Page 10 - Winter 14

Feline Gingivitis – a case of “heat resistance” and anti-oxidation by a lanthanide remedy by Don Hamilton, USA
Katrina is a 2.5 year-old female cat who was adopted from a shelter by a guardian (I’ll call her Anne), who brought her into a home with several cats, dogs, and small birds. She is a muted tabby-tortoiseshell mix, with an orange tint. She was born in the spring of 2012. At the shelter, they gave her two sets of feline combination vaccines plus a rabies vaccine, and they spayed her. They also tested her for FeLV and FIV, and these tests were negative. The shelter personnel said that she was found in a parking lot and had some respiratory symptoms when first found. They had named her Marina, but Anne changed her name to Katrina after the hurricane of the same name, because she was a rambunctious kitten. Katrina developed gingivitis at a fairly young age, starting with the red line at the tooth margin, but progressing to a brighter red color and much greater width, even with some bleeding if touched.
I began treating her before she was a year old, but with little to go on, I had little success. I tried the cat combination vaccine tautodes and a couple of other remedies, including Mercurius vivus 1M. The Merc initially seemed to help a little bit, but this palliative effect did not hold. I chose the Merc mostly as a local remedy, as I really did not have much information for a constitutional remedy. I knew she was a bit timid as well as playful, and that she was not well integrated into the house, but this seemed not so unusual for a new cat in a multi-animal household.
What next? I decided to take a bit of a leap here. I have spoken with many colleagues, and also, on the Academy of Veterinary Homeopathy forum, there had been a lot of discussion about gingivitis in cats. The majority opinions were that gingivitis is much more common in the past decade or so than previously, and that the disease is somewhat difficult to resolve, despite being (to me, at least) something which would seemingly respond well to remedies, as it does not appear to be so deep-seated.
As an aside, I have had some success in assuming there might be a food allergy component, and so sometimes I have guardians use homemade limited allergen
diets, like using one meat type, to which there has been no prior exposure, plus only vegetables for fiber. While I do not think grains are inherently bad for cats in small quantities, grains and proteins are the most likely allergens, and grains can feed inflammation. I use this simple diet for a month or two to see if this helps, then we begin to balance the diet with appropriate calcium and other ingredients.
However, the basis for gingivitis is autoimmune disease, so these measures are only palliative in the end, although they can help interrupt the inflammatory cycle, and in at least one cat, might have stopped the process alone. I did not take this step with Katrina, however, as Anne had her hands full with all the animals at home and a mother in a nursing home.
I had also discussed gingivitis with Geoff Johnson, who similarly reported poor success with the disease. I asked him if he thought the lanthanide remedies might be helpful, as Jan Scholten believes that they are indicated in many cases of autoimmune disease. Geoff agreed that this approach was feasible and worth pursuing. So when it became clear that
the Merc was no longer working for Katrina, I decided to see which lanthanide was best suited to her.
I asked Anne for clarification on the timidity and how Katrina interacted with the other cats. Anne reported that she stayed in one room— “her room,” Anne said—and did not come into the living area where the guardian and the other animals tended to stay. And Katrina liked to be in small boxes, as if she wanted to isolate herself. I questioned Anne further about this, wondering if Katrina retreated on her own or if the other cats picked on her. Anne felt that it was mostly her own choice, but that the other cats did not seem interested in her, as though she did not belong to the household.
Now, how do we fit this information to a lanthanide remedy? According to Scholten, Sankaran, and others who use the periodic table to assist their remedy search, there is a progression from left to right in each row (series), with individuals progressing from uncertainty (stage one) to confidence at the middle/peak (stage 10) to losing confidence or losing ability as the row continues to the right end, stage 18. We can also say that, from left to center the individual comes into focus and success, and then as we pass the center, they begin to lose this ability or it degenerates, but they may exert more and more control in an attempt to maintain their position. Generally, this is about the focus of the row. Each row has a given focus, but for this article we will ignore that; instead we will just look at the lanthanide row. Remember that the lanthanides belong as an insert into row six of the normal periodic table, which also has gold, platinum, and mercury. See the image below:
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