Dr. Smolkin talks about homotoxicology also known as bioregulatory medicine for treating pets, the theory behind it and how it works. Also discussed is how homotoxicology relates to and is different from classical homeopathy including topics about natural treatments, alternative medicine and holistic veterinary care.

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TRANSCRIPT:

Hi, I’m Dr. Ilana Smolkin for healthcareforpets.com. I’m going to talk a little bit about something called homotoxicology. This is similar to homeopathy although slightly different. So first, homeopathy is a growing field in both animal and human health. Homeopathy uses really small, minute amounts of substances that mimic the symptoms that a patient’s having to try and stimulate the body to heal. It’s a principle called, ‘like cures like.’

Homeopathy requires extensive training to come up with the proper remedy for a specific patient. If five patients come in with the same symptoms, each of those patients may require a different remedy based on their unique set of symptoms. For that reason, because it’s so complicated, a German doctor who is also a homeopath came up with what’s called homotoxicology. It’s based more on Western principles so that one specific prep which actually contains several different homeopathic remedies, is used for a specific symptom similar to how we use medicine in Western medicine. Basically the theory is that toxins start to build up in our body, either in the tissue or then eventually get down into our cells causing mutation and eventually leading to severe diseases like cancer. These toxins which can be actual toxic substances, can be things like heat or cold or environmental stresses, can change the function of our cells and the function of our body and interfere with our body’s natural ability to keep itself healthy. The symptoms that we see in disease are merely our body trying to shed out these toxins so if you think of a cold, when we get a virus, what do we see? We get a runny nose, we get maybe a headache, we get stuffy. These things aren’t caused by the virus itself, it’s actually caused by our immune system trying to shed that virus and get that virus out of our system. We actually need that runny nose for a while and those aren’t necessarily bad things.

Western medicine looks at trying to get rid of the symptoms because this is what actually kind of bugs us and keeps us from functioning our best whereas this modality looks more at again that underlying, how can we help speed the process of getting this toxin out of the body so that we can return to good health? What it doesn’t want to do is push it deeper into our body which our body sometimes does, deeper into a cell because although we might get rid of symptoms, actually that may cause changes at a cellular level and down the road lead to things like cancer and mutations. So antihomotoxic medication basically combines a bunch of homeopathy preparations into one that we can use to help the body clear out these toxins from our body.

When taking a kind of history, the practitioner needs to figure out what exactly is the body doing? Where and how deep are these toxins? Are they just really superficial and the body is actually already on the right track of shedding it on its own? Or, do we have a really deep impregnation of those toxins into the cells and could we be heading down to a road of some serious trouble?

These type of medications can be given orally as tablets or sometimes liquids. Sometimes they’re injected and sometimes actually injected into acupuncture sites which is called aquapuncture. During the process regular re-checks are needed to make sure that the body is healing and going in the right direction and what’s interesting is that sometimes we’ll see different symptoms start to come out so the original complaint might be resolved but all of a sudden the eyes are getting watery or something else is going on. Depending on what that symptom is, this can guide us to know, uh oh, are things not going well and is our pet getting sicker? And do we need to change course in our treatment? Or are the eyes watering because we’re now just having success and flushing that all out of the system and everything’s doing what we want it to do so we don’t always need to treat these new symptoms but we definitely need to be aware of them to make sure as I said that we’re going on the right path to health.

Although some of these substances can be found over-the-counter in health food stores, I really recommend that you never use anything over-the-counter. Always discuss it with your veterinarian because we could see a negative effect if combining with other medications.

Now the training in this is really, really clear and it’s important to note that this was never designed to replace Western medicine. It is designed to be used with it so I always tell people you know this works best when we combine the best of all these different worlds, Western medicine, Eastern medicine, and the homotoxicology, we can get really, really great results with that. We want to make sure that we don’t replace necessarily one with the other. You know if we’ve got a really sick pet with cancer, we still need to talk about those other options, you know chemotherapy and those treatments to come up with a plan that’s best for your pet because what’s most important to us is your pet’s health here at healthcareforpets.com.