Page 5 - Winter 13

Telling Porkers (continued from page 2)
In my consulting room he wandered, maybe
searching for crumbs. He seemed quite confi- dent. I called him and he started slightly and gave me a cautious wag. He then lay down looking away from me and the owner.
So how to analyse this?
Firstly the whole case is SCREAMING MAMMAL with every line. You can bet the owner £1000 that a mammal remedy will help or cure. So which one? That is, where things can get slightly harder. Maybe you will have an SRP rubric to help you, but often not. Except for lac- c most mammal remedies are new and have few symptoms compared to our polychrests.
So maybe think about the energy. Charlie is quite confident and dominates the labrador and other dogs, who approach the owner – proba- bly not the mouse-end of the mammalian branch. Equally Charlie does not walk in and own my surgery in an aurum or platina manner, so probably not the big cat end. You do not get a feeling of wild predator about Charlie – prob- ably not lac-lup or weasel. Cunning fox? Probably not. Could we be badger or mole? Is there an underground theme anywhere? No. Could we be otter? Nice idea – better for bathing.
Here having a homeopathic computer program
can be invaluable. I can search about 1000 vol- umes for key words in seconds. So what to search for? What is truly unusual in this case? Don and I saw the same way in. Charlie was born with a deformity, as was his brother. There is a strong miasmatic taint here, and hence I searched the word hermaphrodite, although it was the brother. Who has seen many true her- maphrodite dogs? Not me for sure.
The search reveals 24 remedies – no obvious ‘lacs’ – but what is this Sus scrofa? Investigation reveals it to be the pig – and then all is obvious. In fact the remedy is made from semen, saliva, milk and blood obtained from a special herd used to provide human transplant tissue. This will throw a unique shadow on this remedy compared to your average porker. However reading the remedy one finds:
• ‘Pigs have no sweat glands and desire to wallow in water’
• ‘There is an inherited tendency for sexual abnormalities and hermaphroditism’
• ‘Even when my stomach was full I wanted to go on eating – I would have eaten garbage, if it were put in front of me’
• ‘I had the idea my foot was split up between my big toe and my other toes’ This last fact spotted by Don!
Suddenly we realise that Charlie’s deformed foot looks like a trotter. There are symptoms of itching red skin in the proving but even if there were none, Meg would still be getting some dilute pig.
However the symptoms are probably all just general ‘pig’ symptoms. Do we need to get Sus scrofa? I didn‘t have any. But I did have some Lac suis, obtained and proved I believe by Stefan [Kohlrausch]. I also had some potency M, which I was happy with. If I had 10M, I would have given it. For me the more the patient is like the remedy in nature, the higher the potency required.
Prescription: lac suis M and stop steroids.
4 week follow up – 90% better. Advise stop de- sensitisation injections.
6 week follow up – now shiny coat, no dandruff and no itchiness at all.
4 month follow up – occasional itching. Px Sus scrofa M. I gave this as I mistakenly thought that it contained hair as well as the other ingredients.
6 month follow up – totally fine. Oink oink.
Rethinking Neutering – Holistic Options? by Sara Fox Chapman, USA
My thoughts about routine de-sexing of dogs have changed markedly in my 28 years as a vet. For my first 13 years of practice, I didn’t consider neutering a contentious issue. I believed that, in the United States, responsible people neuter and spay their dogs, and respon- sible vets encourage this practice. I honestly believed that non-neutered males would be hormonal maniacs with rampant prostate prob- lems, and intact bitches would be pursued by packs of males and afflicted by mammary tumours and pyometra. The conventional wis- dom of the time reinforced this; neutered ani- mals were touted as better pets. Concerns about health issues or weight gain were scoffed at as being imaginary or incidental, or due to the owner’s poor feeding or management practices.
My family moved to Cheltenham in the United Kingdom in 1998, and my experience with the neighbourhood dogs was an eye opener. Most of the dogs and about half of the bitches were intact. The streets were not clogged with shagging dogs, most of the ani- mals had good manners, and the bitches were not festooned with mammary tumours. Did my attitude toward de-sexing need some adjust- ment? I enrolled in HPTG in 1999 (Tyler year) and learned from John Saxton that the repro- ductive system was the spiritual home of the sycotic miasm. Case studies with both humans and animals demonstrated the truth of this, and I realised that routine de-sexing was likely
increasing the incidence of chronic problems in many of my patients.
We returned to the States in 2001, and I no longer routinely recommended routine neuter- ing. This is a problem in the US, because all dogs acquired from rescue groups, and most dogs of non-breeding quality sold by responsi- ble breeders, are required to be de-sexed by a year of age or sooner. Many shelters gonadec- tomise juvenile animals as young as ten or twelve weeks.
During the next few years, I read with inter- est articles about the positive and negative effects of neutering. Dr. Margaret Root Kustritz has published several review articles on the subject; the latest was in 2012: http://www.tc.umn.e du/~rootk001/icar%202012.pdf.
Most recently (Feb 2013), a study at University of California at Davis examined the effect of neutering on joint disease and cancer incidence on Golden Retrievers: http://www.pl osone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2 Fjournal.pone.0055937.
The conventional veterinary community has taken notice of this information, and a Journal of the AVMA news article (Nov 2013) summa- rized the findings: https://www.avma.org/news/ javmanews/pages/131101a.aspx
Just in case you don’t want to read these papers right this second, let me summarize the findings. Kustritz’s literature reviews compile evidence across breed lines showing definite
effects of removing the gonads, aside from the obvious one of population control. Actual changes in frequency of various conditions are in the paper cited above. For brevity, let’s look at just the increase or decrease in incidence: • Inter-male aggression and roaming behav-
iour decreases with castration, however owner-directed aggression and reactivity increase with ovario-hysterectomy or cas- tration. Castration may increase the inci- dence of senility in males.
• Mammary tumours (half of which are malig- nant) decrease in incidence in spayed bitches in some studies, but not in others.
• Prostatic tumours (almost always malig- nant) increase in neutered dogs. Benign prostatic hypertrophy is very common in intact older dogs (and men) and castration (in dogs) is curative.
• Bladder cancer (often malignant) is increased in gonadectomised dogs.
• Testicular cancer (which rarely metasta- sizes) is common in aged male dogs; cas- tration is curative.
• Hemangiosarcoma and osteosarcoma increase in gonadectomised dogs.
• Hip dysplasia and anterior cruciate ligament rupture increase in gonadectomised dogs.
• Urinary incontinence increases in ovario- hysterectomised female dogs.
• Pyometra occurs in up to 25% of intact bitches over 10 years of age. Surgery is Continued on page 6
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