What Doesn’t Work

The company sent my store a hilariously unprofessional notice, blaming just about everyone but themselves for the problem and promising to resume production as soon as they get their finances back in order.

Now seems like a great time to remind everybody that while raw meat is the natural diet of wild felines, it can still pose a health risk to domestic cats (and the humans they live with!) Wild cats, as well as feral and indoor/outdoor cats, generally consume their prey immediately after they kill it. The commercial handling, transportation, and long term storage of raw meat greatly increases the risk of contamination. It poses a human health risk as well as a feline one, as bacteria can and will get all over your kitchen if you’re leaving raw meat out for your cats. Even animals who do not become ill can spread the bacteria in their feces.

From a 2011 literature review:

Wikipedia has a short and accurate article about Bach Flower Remedies, which I would recommend reading. You will often run into them in health food stores or other places with an alternative medicine vibe. Rescue Remedy, a blend of five different BFRs, is intended to provide a sense of calm in situations of great fear and stress. Is is often sold in an alcohol-free formula for pets, usually dogs. Although Rescue Remedy is far and away the product I most commonly hear recommended by dog people, the company maintains that all of its products work on nonhuman animals. Here is an excerpt of their claims:

Me: I’m a vet tech student just starting my first clinical, and the hospital I’ve been placed at uses a low level laser on every incision, to “reduce pain and inflammation and speed up healing”. I’m skeptical, but certain that as a student being given a month-long learning opportunity, it would not be appropriate for me to bring up my concerns. (They already have a robust pain management protocol in place, so I’m not sure why additional therapies would even be necessary, but its not harming anyone.) The doctor claims that there is solid scientific evidence supporting its efficacy, but she also does acupuncture, so who knows. I feel like an idiot wearing goggles and waving a laser around, but writing off the whole thing as fake (or even just unproven) threatens my ability to trust what I’m learning from these people. They’re a long-established, well-respected, busy clinic with devoted clients. How does one separate the wheat from the chaff?

professor: yeah?

me: ...should I be fluoridating my cat’s water fountain?

He said that he had found all sorts of remedies on Amazon which had five-star reviews, but that he was trying to shop locally. I explained that as a self-limiting disease, kennel cough is one of those things that amasses long lists of home remedies- because whatever people try right before it goes away on its own appears to have worked. I told him that if he took the dog to the vet they would almost certainly prescribe antibiotics if he asked (which would help shorten the course of the illness) but that many vets consider it unnecessary in mild cases, and try to avoid overusing the antibiotics due to the risk of creating new drug-resistant strains. He liked that.

Turns out a friend had told him that antibiotics didn’t work because the disease was caused by a virus. I completely fumbled the explanation that while Bordetella is a genus of bacteria (with many different species and strains), there are other pathogenic agents which can cause identical symptoms in dogs, including viruses. To be fair, it’s just fundamentally confusing, and also at that point we were holding up the line, and he was starting to scrape the bottom of the barrel of what I remembered from my Small Animal Diseases class. I’ll do better next time. Finally I told him that he could probably get a prescription antitussive if the coughing was as severe as he said it was becoming, but that if he chose to wait it out the (young, healthy) dog would almost certainly be fine. And not to be surprised if the symptoms lasted up to 3 weeks. He was reluctant to go to the vet, but I reiterated my skepticism about the random stuff on Amazon. If I had thought to mention it, I might have told him that if the vet had physically examined his dog within the last year (and liked/trusted him as a client) they might be willing to write the necessary script/s based on a video of the cough- its very distinctive, and if there’s no reason to suspect other potential causes...well, nobody wants a contagious animal in a hospital lobby if they don’t absolutely have to be there. But on the other hand, a lot of veterinary antitussives are technically opioids, and therefore controlled substances. So probably it was good not to put the idea in his head. Just because I’ve seen it done doesn’t make it best practices, and it doesn’t mean that his vet would be comfortable doing it.

I only just barely managed not to reply to his final, barked question- “what about the antibacterial properties of coconut oil?”- with “there aren’t any”, instead simply saying “uhhhh” as he was swept away by the crowd of people impatient to buy dog food. I think it went pretty ok, overall. I remembered most of what I needed to remember, and he was happy to have someone to talk to about his poor, coughing dog. And he wasn’t mad at me or insulted, which means that I got my tone and phrasing right. Hope he listened to some of it.

Immediate thoughts:

1. This customer bought cooked bones. Enzymes denature at high temperatures, rendering them ineffective. The person who gave her this advice (a veterinary assistant, which means it could be either a 17 year old kid with no formal schooling or a 60 year old dog breeder who took a 9-month online assistant’s course and has been working in veterinary medicine for their whole life) actually suggested raw bones. Customer stated she did not buy the raw bones because they were ‘messy’. I did not mention the heat issue, but simply recommended that she double check the advice with her vet. 

2. I really have no idea what enzymes she might be talking about. There are so many damn enzymes, and I don’t have the time or ability to memorize all of them. Could she actually mean hematopoietic stem cells?

3. Why knucklebones, specifically? What are knucklebones? In this case, the products labeled as ‘knucklebones’ were slices of the head of a bovine femur, not an ankle bone as you might expect. So that’s mostly red marrow, which is another clue that she might have been thinking about stem cells.

4. There actually have been multiple studies (in dogs, even!) suggesting that stem cells derived from bone marrow can help regenerate tissue lost to periodontal disease. Cool. But that was with careful transplantation of living cells, not just...a dog chewing on a bone. Can those results be assumed to transfer over in this situation? I’m also fairly sure that the cooking and preservation process these commercial bone chews go through will kill all living animal cells. So...???

Allergies suck. Allergy testing sucks. Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a simple, relatively inexpensive, at-home kit that would let you take a DNA sample from your dog and send it in to a laboratory, which would analyze it and send you a list of everything your pup was allergic to?

Yup, that would be awesome, simplifying the diagnostic process immeasurably,  saving clients money, patients suffering, and veterinarians precious time. In 2012, Immune IQ was launched, a product which promised to do just that. Unfortunately, it didn’t work. A study a few years back done by a team of skeptical veterinary dermatologists, found that “ImmuneIQ test results given for multiple submissions of samples from two dogs were no different from results that would occur by random chance”. In addition, they failed to distinguish between dog fur and fake fur, or between saliva and water, and sent back full allergen reports for the fake samples. The company refused to give any information about their ‘proprietary’ testing process.

Vets write rabies waivers for dogs who have had previous anaphylactic vaccine reactions, if the state allows them to do so. If not, they have a plan in place beforehand- usually Benadryl for the dog. After the nightmare of Feline Injection Site Fibrosarcomas (which one of my childhood cats was euthanized for), PureVax was developed as an option to provide immunity without the risk factor of aluminum adjuvants, and vaccine protocols were changed so that certain vaccines are only given to high-risk cats, and given in locations where a tumor could safely and easily be removed. Vaccines which prove to be less effective than their manufacturer claimed are abandoned en masse by the profession.

Natural Pet Pharmaceuticals by King Bio- (which has the distinction of being the company on this list to most recently get a warning letter from the FDA for making unverified claims about their remedies), HomeoPet, PetAlive, Newton Homeopathics, Smarthealth Naturopathics, Dr. Goodpet, Only Natural Pet, VETiONX, BestLife4Pets, and Natural K-10