Given that I have put in 44 years working as a large animal vet, it is no surprise that my retirement might take some time to happen. My first try at retirement in 2021 stopped short when Dr. Lamb had to cut back on his practice due to health issues. There weren’t enough vets to go around and I couldn’t leave my clients and patients in the lurch. With a new year, a desire to spend more time with my wife, daughters, and grandson, and the emergence of two new excellent young vets, I realize I can now do anything I want to. For me, that is practicing acupuncture, chiropractic medicine, and cold laser therapy. These treatments have many applications: lameness, older animals who need a pick-me-up, and when conventional medicine reaches a dead end. Doing alternative medicine also avoids emergencies, enabling me to focus on all the things in life that I never had a chance to do. Guess I’ll just put the saddle on and go.
The following are a few of the more interesting alternative medicine cases from the Fall. I will keep putting up new stories as time goes by.
UP AND WALKING
The end of summer and fall brought me a number of difficult cases. This Shih Tzu had been suffering from mobility impairment for a while before the owner and I could find a time to bring him to me. When he came out of the SUV, he literally could not pick up his rear end and had to drag it along. On examination, I found it was not one, but multiple musculoskeletal issues throughout the body. I methodically used chiropractic techniques one at a time to adjust and strengthen his body to a place where he could stand and then walk. As I finished the treatment, I was gratified to find he felt so good he insisted on walking himself.
BUNNY
About a month later, I met a new friend and patient, named Bunny. Whereas the Shih Tzu could at least pull his hind end along, this new case looked totally out of gas. The worst case scenario crossed my mind, but I let go of those thoughts to give the patient my best. The situation was so severe that I decided to try something new I have been working on. My hunch was that, according to Chinese medicine, the heart meridian was weak, resulting in muscular weakness in the dog. Sure, enough on pulse diagnosis, the heart meridian was weak, as was the pericardium meridian. I used an acupuncture treatment to tonify both heart and pericardium. My patient looked brighter! I continued to work on the acupuncture meridians of the rear end to strengthen the pelvis and associated muscles and complemented the acupuncture with a chiropractic adjustment. When I had done everything I could, I said to the clients, “I cannot think of anything else to do.” With that, the young child in the room jumped up and ran out the door into the waiting room followed closely by Bunny. Like Lazarus, Bunny had come back to life. It was such a great moment that I had to go out in the waiting room too and jump around with Bunny. See picture for me getting a lick from Bunny - makes it all worth it!
YOU HAVE TO BELIEVE YOU CAN DO IT
When the call came it sounded routine. The horse was going to Virginia for the winter and the owner wanted a chiropractic treatment to help him withstand the trailer ride. We set a day for the following week, but when it came, the owner called back advising me not to come because the horse was colicking. We agreed she would call back when he was better and ready to leave, as her regular vet was taking care of the colic treatment. It is unusual to exhibit physical distress, but I think hoses do sense the tensions involved in closing down a barn for the winter. A thought passed through my mind wondering if I should have gone anyway - could the problem be an imbalance of sympathetic and parasympathetic systems?
Four days went by and I had heard nothing, so I called the owner back. The horse was still suffering from colic! Somehow, he had made it through four days of not eating and getting up and down in pain. While amazing that the horse was still alive, both the owner and the horse were at the end of what they could do. The owner wanted to follow her regular vet’s last idea of taking him on a trailer ride that morning. This is an idea based on the anecdotal stories that many horses recover from colic on the trailer ride to the surgical referral hospital. If this didn’t work, she wanted to try acupuncture.
It turned out the trailer ride only stressed the horse further and sure enough the phone rang the next morning. I’ve learned from a career of driving the dirt roads of Vermont that it always takes longer to go East/West in Vermont, but this was a particularly arduous drive across roads still rough from the July flooding. I wanted to go fast, but there’s nothing like driving on narrow, rough roads next to deep ditches resulting from flooding. Cell service was spotty, so I just had to guess which way to turn. Needless to say I was ready to be there when I arrived.
My patient was laying down, but when I approached, he kicked out, and got up. I could tell immediately that there was no way to safely put in an acupuncture needle and have it stay with the horse in so much distress. Instead, I would have to use the beam of photons from my cold laser to stimulate the acupuncture points and treat the affected organs. I started with my hunch to check the sympathetic/parasympathetic balance. Sure enough, it was imbalanced and the parasympathetic nervous system was weak. The sympathetic nervous system governs those body actions that one needs to think about in order to do. The parasympathetic governs all the body functions that happen without thinking and a major component of it is digestion with aid from the vagus nerve. The vagus is a long nerve that runs from the brain stem to the organs throughout the abdomen and controls digestion. On this horse, the vagus was weak. Knowing how to tonify this nerve, I had hope that I might be able to turn this horse around!
Now I was off to the races with purpose to check relevant organs. I started with heart based the wisdom of a 1,000 year old book, The Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Chinese Acupuncture. The most important chapter is Chapter 6 on The Heart, which teaches that no treatment is complete without consideration of the heart. Again I found deficiency in the strength of the flow of Qi (or energy) through the heart and the pericardium. I determined where the flow of Qi was blocked and I corrected it by using the laser to stimulate an acupuncture point. Once corrected, I paused to look at my patient. He had improved and was laying down calmly without kicking. His expression had relaxed and I knew I was really getting somewhere!
Next, I methodically checked the organs involved in digestion, finding weakness in the stomach, spleen, liver, gall bladder, and large intestine. I was able to correct all of these with acupuncture. I got up, patted the horse telling him we were finished and that he could get up. This he did and went over and began to eat! Do you believe in miracles? He had stopped colicking and didn’t require any more medical treatment.
I came back 10 days later for a re-check and acupuncture before the horse left for the winter leaving. He was fine and none of the things that were off that day persisted. The treatment held. Something the horse had eaten or the stress he had felt had caused him to spiral out of balance. Fortunately, his heart was strong enough to carry him through the time before I got there.
This picture shows him at the recheck 10 days post-treatment. Thoroughbreds run lean, but the picture shows the weight he had lost. Still, you can see an animated horse ready to go.
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