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Veterinary Guide to Holistic Therapies
Ilse Pedler
One of my aims for my term as BAHVS president was to try and interest younger vets in homeopathy with the hope that some would then enrol for further training and fill the huge shortfall we have of homeopathic vets in the UK. The first project was the production of a guide to holistic therapies, which would be distributed to all final year vet students for the next 2 years. I’m pleased to say that after a year of recruiting leading practitioners to write chapters
and generating sponsorship, the guide is now complete.
The Veterinary Guide to Holistic Therapies contains chapters on Acupuncture, Herbal Medicine, Homeopathy, Chiropractic, Osteopathy and Flower Essences. Each chapter gives a brief explanation of the therapy, what to expect in a consultation, a case study or two and where to find further information; in particular who the national association is and what training courses are available. It is hoped that enough young vets will be sufficiently interested to find
out more and hopefully train in the future.
The guide will be available in the future in digital format and if anyone is interested, please contact me on ilsepedlerholisticvet@gmail.com
Ten Ox-herding pictures by Peter Gregory, UK
4. Catching the Ox
In this picture the oxherder has finally caught the ox, but the ox doesn’t want to be caught. Holding onto it takes a lot of energy and strength.
In homeopathy it’s the point when you realise there is more to it than just following instructions. Because of our successes
with first aid and local prescribing it
seems simple enough and we just ‘follow the book’. This gets us so
far but we find that sometimes
it doesn’t work so well and
when we try it on a chronically itchy dog it
doesn’t help at all. This is discouraging, and at the
same time there’s sarcasm
from our colleagues. We
wonder if it would be easier to
just stick to conventional medicine. But we have seen the
effect on our patients and we are convinced this is worth pursuing so we stick to the task and resolve to keep going.
In the practice in Cardiff, there was another assistant – let’s call her Gwen. She was a little older than me and had been in the practice for some years. Of course we shared our experiences. After a while she became interested in what I was doing and decided to try homeopathy too. Like
me she tried it on a few simple cases and had encouraging results so we had more to talk about in our breaks! We were both very enthusiastic. One of the remedies she found really effective and useful was Causticum, for arthritic problems in old dogs. It’s still one of my favourite
remedies in those circumstances. I left the practice after my 6 months was up, and returned for a visit a few months later. On asking about homeopathy Gwen replied she wasn’t using it any more. She went on to tell me how she had experienced a couple of bad aggravations with Causticum, and although they had gone on to improve, the clients weren’t initially happy and it was actually the boss’s wife who told her to
stop using homeopathy.
So we now know we are going to have to put some energy into this process. It’s a bit more difficult than it seemed at first. We have to ‘hang on in there’ – just like the oxherder
hanging onto the ox’s tail in the wilderness.
Not so easy after all
I’m sure this is the right way I’ll hang on in there
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