Healthy Cats Acting Sick

In the latest issue of DVM Newsmagazine there was the oddest article about a study done at The Ohio State University, in which they discovered that healthy cats who were acting sick improved with environmental enrichment.
OK, wait a minute. Healthy cats acting sick? If the cats were acting sick, how were they healthy? The article doesn't say. So let's suppose that the cats were normal on physical exam and had normal blood and urine analysis results. Because if they were truly sick, something would be abnormal there, right?
Wouldn't it be nice if that were true?
The public may not be aware that a common presentation for a veterinary patient (that's medicalese for why you took your pet to the vet) is ADR - ain't doing right. Often these animals are "normal" on physical exam, and have normal laboratory results, and get sent home without treatment because there appears to be nothing to treat.
Is that the same as being healthy? Having no detectable signs of illness?
Go to a doctor's office. Let's suppose that someone is there because there is something wrong with them. You can look at this person, you can touch them, but you cannot ask them any questions, such as "How do you feel? What is bothering you?" If all the laboratory results are normal, and the person looks okay, you tell them they appear to be healthy and can go home now.
Do they have a headache? How would you know?
Are they depressed? How would you know?
It seems to me that we should give these nonhuman beings a little more credit, and assume that perhaps there IS something wrong with them, even if our crude diagnostic tests and rudimentary physical exam indicate otherwise.

Cause and Effect

Sometimes in medicine we get hung up in the cause and effect loop. When we have a collection of symptoms, the purpose of the allopathic doctor is to find a diagnosis, because if we can reach a diagnosis, then we'll know what drug to give. These diagnostic labels, however, don't seem like enough of an answer to me.
If you have the right conglomeration of symptoms, you can be diagnosed with anything from hypothyroidism to lupus to chronic fatigue syndrome. And that's often where the diagnostic quest ends, because once you have a name, you either give the matching drug, or tell the person or their pet to suck it up and learn to tolerate their symptoms, if there is no matching drug.
But what about the true cause? What is it that makes our bodies do us wrong in the first place? This isn't something that happens randomly, and I don't believe that our bodies make mistakes. It's important for people to realize that the diagnosis is not the end (or the beginning) of the story. Hypothyroidism is all well and good, but what makes your thyroid decrease its function? You may have asthma, but why would your body react in  an exaggerated fashion to an allergen when someone else's doesn't?
We may not ever find these answers as to how we got detoured off the road to perfect health. Many of my clients are surprised to find out that in veterinary medicine we are often faced with the challenge of having to treat sometimes severe conditions without a basic working diagnosis. This is because diagnostic testing can get very expensive very quickly, and most pet owners have to pay out of pocket for this stuff, and also because some tests are invasive or potentially harmful, and we are often hesitant to visit these upon our pets.
With homeopathy, however, we can address the "cause behind the cause", even if we can't name it. There are other holistic therapies that are similarly focused on the state of the entire organism, and therefore don't require that we be able to name a thing in order to treat it. So for those of you who have been turned away, and have been told that whatever ails you can't be named and therefore can't be treated (except with antidepressants, 'cause if we can't figure out what's wrong with you, maybe it is all in your head!), get yourself to your nearest homeopath, acupuncturist, or osteopath, and get some relief! And do the same for your pets!

Old Dogs

Lately I've been looking at my dogs with a more critical eye than usual. One of them is 13 now, two are twelve and a half years old, and the little one is seven or so. They were all strays, so it's a guess. Initially I was just thinking about how to bring them into condition for our spring-summer-fall walking season, but then I realized I have a certain amount of fear about them at this point in their lives.
In the last 2 years, I lost three of my dogs to cancer.
That's a lot. Of course, I had a lot of dogs. Now I have fewer of them.
What's been on my mind is that I feel like I'm waiting for the hammer to fall, and for one or more of them to fall ill with some dread disease. This is not how I want their advanced years to be, with me counting their days under the worried watchful eye of my anxiety.
I do all these positive things to keep them alive: I feed my dogs a varied raw food diet, and give them a variety of health-maintaining supplements. I walk them outside when the weather permits and try to entertain them inside when it doesn't (even though they just look at me like I'm nuts). I talk to them, play with them, and massage them. And that might have been good enough while they were younger, but now I worry that it's not going to be.
So what to do?
I'm in the process of designing a regular detoxification program for them. Just in the way that some people do periodic cleanses or detox protocols for themselves, maybe this is something we should be doing for our pets. Instead of waiting until pollutants build to an intolerable level, and disease appears, why not try to lighten the load on a regular basis? So here are my goals: it has to be easy to do, consist of high quality herbs and supplements, be palatable, and not cause major detoxification reactions like vomiting or diarrhea.
That's what I'm working on.