Linear Thinking Part II

Linear thinking can also prevent us from utilizing multiple solutions to a problem at the same time, which I find to be a very effective approach. Many times, when I prescribe a diet change, a homeopathic remedy, chiropractic care, and a couple of supplements, I am asked, "But how will we know what's making Rover better?"I used to be bothered by this as well. As humans, especially living in our troubled and convoluted times, we have a strong desire for things to just be simple. Surely there must be a better way to do things - one better way. In school we are taught that there is one right answer and it's hardly ever "all of the above." If we do more experiments, perhaps eventually we will reach some basic, primal truth that will be the One Truth, like the Grand Unified Theory of the Universe.
Well, I've had to get over that mindset.
Out of all the things I prescribed, which one helped Rover the most? I don't care. Everything works together.
There often is no one right answer. Our bodies are affected by innumerable influences all the time, many of which are beyond our awareness. We require optimal diet, optimal movement, optimal posture, and optimal internal and external environments in order to be truly healthy. One piece of the puzzle is often not sufficient. At least not to get the kind of results I'm aiming for.

Linear Thinking Part I

This blog is about the linear cause and effect thinking that seems embedded in conventional medicine. This type of thinking goes, well, a lot of the time when we see symptom A, we also find B, therefore B must be the CAUSE of A.For example, from a recent TV drug ad: "The root cause of gout is high uric acid." No, it's not. Yes, gout is associated with high uric acid levels, and we know that it's those uric acid crystals precipitating in the joints that are the source of the joint pain of gout. But high uric acid does not cause gout. It is one of the syndrome of symptoms that, grouped together, we call gout.
What's the cause, then? We don't know.
Whatever it is that made your body start to form uric acid crystals and allow them to aggregate and precipitate. Chances are, like a lot of other diseases, one day some scientist will find a DNA change that appears sometimes in people with gout, and that will then be touted as the "cause" of gout.
OK, what makes your DNA do funky things? We don't know.
A big reason behind the "we don't know" is because modern medicine has a heck of a time dealing with multifactorialism. With the type of experimentation that is done, only one hypothesis can be tested at a time, and all other variables must be eliminated or reduced to inconsequentiality. In other words, we can only ask one question at a time. We can't ask "what causes this?" We can only ask, "is pollution associated with this?" "Is it dietary?" "Is it the DNA?" "Is it traumatic?" If the answers end up being yes to all of these, then they get to duke it out and try to choose one "root cause." Usually DNA wins, because we believe that DNA is the primary code of our bodies and is unchanging and beyond influence by factors like vaccines or the electromagnetic fields of power lines.
Wouldn't it be great if life actually worked that way?
Things would be a lot simpler. "Why did Jimmy drop out of school?" "He's stupid." "Oh, OK."

Vaccine History

Last night I was reading some veterinary journals. They always have case histories of animals that have come down with some weird disease, or a weird presentation of a common disease. The history given is usually limited to the clinical signs, and never include what I want to know: And when were they last vaccinated? And what were they being fed while they were vaccinated?
All vaccines come with an insert, that little piece of paper that tells you how to use the vaccine, what percentage of animals can be expected to be protected by it, etc. I never read these myself until about 3 or 4 years ago, when I suddenly wondered what was on this little piece of paper that comes with the vaccines.
Vaccine inserts mention several times that the product is for use in healthy animals, and that only healthy animals should be vaccinated. At the end there are precautions, including the tidbit that animals who are stressed (do you really think your cat likes to ride in the car?), malnutritioned (every pet on dry precessed kibble food), or incubating any disease shouldn't be vaccinated because....well, they don't say what might happen, because it's unknown. It is completely not known what kind of effects, short or long term, the vaccine might have on your pet.
Another article mentioned that viruses for the cat vaccines are grown in feline kidney cell culture. Guess what happens when you inject them into your cat? That's right, the cat develops antibodies to everything in the injection, including...cat kidney cells. Maybe that's why just about every cat develops kidney disease at some point.
Hmmm, food for thought.

It's Hot Today

Unbelievably hot today. I walked the dogs early this morning, right after morning rush hour - I have to walk them down the main road to get to a safer place to walk them. It was so early the mosquitos weren't quite done with their own morning rush hour.
I think the dogs still got heatstroke. It was hotter than hell.
Tonight I went a little light on their raw food for dinner, and added yogurt. It seemed kind of like dog ice cream. Now Alice is eating grass compulsively. Sigh. Maybe the dairy is not a good choice when it's so hot out. Now they're lying around in the house being miserable. Sigh. Me, too.
Tomorrow it's supposed to be even hotter. I don't know if I'll walk them at all.

Days like this remind me of when I was working as a farmhand in the desert on the Egyptian border. One night, sitting around the camp fire, there were a couple of new girls from Zimbabwe. The Israeli guy turns to them and says, "It's hot today." Yes, they agreed, it was. A few minutes later he repeated, "It's hot today." Turns out that was all the English he knew.

It's hot today.