Big Pharma takes over veterinary medicine

[~flower~]

       While I think this article is a "bit over the top" I do believe there is a good amount of things to think about in it also. 


http://www.newstarget.com/021935.html
Originally published July 17 2007

Big Pharma takes over veterinary medicine; dogs and cats drugged with chemicals for profit
by Mike Adams

Big Pharma has successfully completed its takeover of veterinary medicine in the United States and other first-world nations. Knowing that massive profits could be generated through the bodies of pets, drug companies have spent two decades pursuing an aggressive campaign of rewriting vet school curricula, influencing veterinarians and brainwashing pet owners into thinking their dogs, cats and horses need drugs in order to be healthy. It was an easy sell: Most consumers already demonstrate a cult-like belief in pharmaceutical medicine thanks to a barrage of direct-to-consumer advertising funded by deep-pocketed drug companies, and it was only a minor shift to get them to believe animals need synthetic chemicals in their bodies, too.

So today, the majority of veterinarians in the United States now practice chemical-based medicine on pets. At the first sign of any health symptom, they slap the animal with a prescription for expensive, patented pharmaceuticals. Arthritis, diabetes, heart disease, cancer and even depression are now being treated with dangerous prescription medications. Earlier this year, the FDA gave approval for Prozac, a powerful mind-altering drug, to be prescribed to dogs, and many of the most common drugs for people are now routinely used in pets (including chemotherapy drugs for cancer treatment).

(What's next, Ritalin for puppies? Ten years ago, it would have seemed absurd to diagnose a dog as suffering from Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder, but today, it's no more insane than the mass diagnosis of human children with this utterly fictitious disease designed to do one thing: Sell profitable amphetamine drugs to children...)

Pet health is now in rapid decline
The result of all this is that our dogs and cats are sicker than ever. Ask any vet who's been practicing for more than ten years: They've never seen such an increase in the rate of liver disease, nervous system disorders, cancers and diabetes. Ever wonder why? It's because pets are being routinely poisoned with pet food and pet medicine. Popular anti-flea and anti-tick medications, all by themselves, are so toxic to the liver of any animal that if they were prescribed to humans, their side effects would make the Vioxx fiasco look like a harmless prank.

The idea of actually feeding your dog such high doses of poison that it ends up in the skin tissues where it kills ticks and fleas should be horrifying to any intelligent pet owner, yet most pet owners just buy what their vet tells them to buy, and they feed one chemical after another to their pets, oblivious to the fact that they're actually poisoning them. (And then they wonder why their animals die of cancer a few years later... gee, didn't anybody connect the dots here?)

Thanks to Big Pharma influence, veterinary medicine today has become just as much of a joke as the conventional medical system used to treat humans. The goal is no longer to actually heal anyone, but rather to maximize profits by treating and managing diseases without curing or preventing them. Many vets have figured this out, too: If they treat the animals with pharmaceuticals instead of actually curing them of disease (or preventing disease), they benefit from lucrative repeat business! And some of the fees charged by vets now -- especially in emergency veterinary care -- are just as outrageous as fees charged to sick humans in hospitals. I once spent more than $1,000 for a single day of treatment trying to rescue a sick dog, and half of those fees were for bags of saline solution dripped through an IV. $500 for saline solution? Give me a break. I got ripped off and taken advantage of by a pet care clinic that was exploiting pet emergencies for maximum profits. (There are crooks and dishonest practitioners in the pet care industry just like in the people care industry.)

Holistic animal care practitioners
It's not all bad news, though. Fortunately, there are more holistic practitioners in veterinary medicine than in human medicine, and it's fairly easy to find a holistic vet in any major city if you look around. The holistic veterinarians understand nutrition, herbs, homeopathy and other natural modalities. They prescribe solutions and treat animals in ways that are outlawed in human medicine (because they actually work). If you care at all about the health of your pets, I strongly urge you to seek out and work with a holistic pet care practitioner who avoids prescribing pharmaceuticals. Any veterinarian who thinks Fido is depressed and needs antidepressant drugs should frankly have their licensed stripped away and be banished to some distant, isolated South Pacific island overpopulated with sexually aggressive baboons.

Numerous natural products are also available for pet care today. One company I trust and strongly recommend is Azmira (www.Azmira.com), which offers a truly impressive assortment of herbal and homeopathic solutions for pet health challenges. They have a whole line of health products that have been tested and proven over two decades of clinical use to help with things like joint pain, respiratory infections, thyroid function, immune function and much more. See their product line here: http://www.azmira.com/Products.htm

You can also call Azmira at (U.S.) 520-886-1727 or 520-293-6639 (8 am - 5 pm Arizona time, which is Mountain Time for half the year and Pacific Time for the other half), and their vet technicians will actually consult with you over the phone, free of charge, and try to help you find the best solutions for your pet (which may include nutrition, supplements, exercise, herbal formulas or other items). Mention you heard about them from NewsTarget, please, since Dr. Lisa Newman has been a strong contributor to NewsTarget and authored the popular special report, Pet Food Ingredients Revealed! (a must-read report exposing the truth about pet food ingredients). We earn nothing from the sale of Azmira products and have no financial ties.

I've called Dr. Newman several times and found her and her staff to be incredibly knowledgeable, polite and highly motivated to help improve the health of pets everywhere. Please have patience with them, however. They have more calls than they can easily handle. You may spend time on hold or need to call back later. Please respect their time, as they are providing a much-needed service with the phone consultation. And if you take advantage of their time on the phone, please consider supporting their organization by purchasing some of their naturopathic products.

The future looks dim for mainstream pet health
When you look at the outrageous toxicity of mainstream pet food, and you combine that with the chemical burden of pharmaceutical medicine, the future of health for pets in America looks rather dim. The pet food being sold at stores -- even the so-called "scientific" brands -- are mostly crap. Only specialty pet food companies offer genuine food. (My favorites are www.Azmira.com and www.TheHonestKitchen.com ).

The way pets are being treated today by many mainstream veterinarians amounts to nothing less than the chemical abuse of dogs and cats by an industry that has, sadly, exchanged ethics for profits and no longer sees its primary mission as helping improve the quality of life of our animal friends. Personally, I'm outraged by the practice of drugging dogs, cats and other animals with synthetic chemicals to treat degenerative health conditions, and I think those who promote or follow such practices are engaged in extremely unethical, cruel behaviors that should be criminalized. Just like in the human health care system, nutrition has been thrown out the window and is now replaced with a system of chemical invasion that can only lead to a worsening of the long-term health of the animals exposed to such dangerous treatments.

The proper use of pharmaceuticals
Some chemical medicines do have a limited role in quality veterinary care, however. Painkillers have a useful but narrow role. Antibiotics, although they are widely abused, can be helpful in certain limited situations. But treating dogs with antidepressants, chemotherapy, diabetes drugs, statin drugs, osteoporosis drugs and other such chemical agents is patently absurd. Most pet health conditions can be easily prevented or cured with good nutrition, and more challenging health problems can be cheaply and safely solved with herbal therapies and other naturopathic modalities. There is no scientifically justifiable role in veterinary medicine for the majority of the pharmaceuticals now being pushed onto vets, vet techs, and pet owners.

Even the pet shelters are being influenced by Big Pharma. When I rescued my pet from a local animal shelter, I was given a DVD sponsored by a drug company. It offered to teach me about pet behavior while brainwashing me into thinking I needed to give my dog toxic pills for preventing ticks and fleas. As this simple example demonstrates, even the animal shelters are now in bed with Big Pharma. There's almost no organization in pet health today that hasn't been taken over (or strongly influenced) by Big Pharma.

It's not enough to drug all the sick people in the world, you see. Big Pharma has to invent diseases and drug all the healthy people, too. And then, they have to drug all the children and infants to make sure those little beings are set up for future organ failure, which is even more lucrative for the drug companies later on. And just to drive yet more profits home, they've got to drug all the animals. Now the cats, dogs, horses, birds, lizards and other animals are no longer safe from the reach of Big Pharma. Drugs are posing a serious chemical threat to the health of pets.

There is almost no living creature left on this planet that hasn't been considered a potential revenue source by Big Pharma, and if they could make money drugging all the fish in the ocean, you can bet they'd come up with a fictitious fish disease and find a way to drop little fish pills into the oceans of the world. Profit is the purpose. Health is irrelevant. And your precious pet is only seen as a vehicle for generating profits by an industry that has zero compassion for living beings (human, canine, feline or otherwise). There is no effort to protect life. It is only an effort to protect (and expand) profits.

What you can do right now
If you're a pet owner, I urge you to do two things right now:

1) Switch to a healthy, natural, holistic pet food. Read the report, Pet Food Ingredients Revealed to learn the truth about pet food ingredients. And make fresh meals from scratch whenever possible. Pets should not be raised to live on processed foods.

2) Fire your drug-pushing vet and switch to a holistic or naturopathic animal care expert, even if they don't have the same licensing credentials as the drug-pushing vet. State authorities, you see, are trying to de-license naturopathic vets, and there's a big effort now to push naturopathic vets out of the industry. Sometimes you have to seek them out yourself and ignore state licensing boards (which are totally owned by Big Pharma, by the way). I've found that licensing credentials are essentially useless, and the more credentials some vet has, the more deeply they're brainwashed into a pharmaceutical approach to veterinary medicine.

If you want a healthy pet, you've got to get back to basics: Nutrition, exercise, disease prevention and natural remedies. There is absolutely no rationale that justifies the routine chemical treatment of pets with patented, high-profit pharmaceuticals. Mainstream veterinary medicine, as practiced today, is a cruel, exploitive industry that ultimate causes significant harm to the very animals we should be trying to save.

Don't be suckered by the "miracle pill" sales pitch. Dogs, cats and horses don't need meds. What they need is great nutrition and medicine from nature.

Just like people.


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[Vet]

while I dont' disagree with some of what is said in this article---and I'll be the first to admit there are veterinarians who are "pill poppers"---meaning they seem to have the mentality that there is a pill for every problem and you have to prescribe that pill to practice good medicine (I used to work for one of those, he drove me crazy). 

The thing that gets me with some of the homeopathic fanatics is that they don't stop to think what they are doing is basically substituting one drug for another.  The definition of a drug is a substance that results in an alteration of the physiology of an organism--be it from normal to abnormal or from abnormal to normal.   It doesn't really matter if this substance is something that was grown in the garden or synthesized, the end product is still the exact same. 

I have a reasonable interest in herbology.  The thing is when you break it down to a biochemical level, the only real difference in herbs and synthetic "drugs" is the concentration of the active ingredient.  And when considering dosing of medication, it doesn't matter if you are giving 25 digitalis leaves to get a desired effect or you are giving 1 digoxin tablet twice per day, the end point of attemptin to alter the animals physiology to control the disease process is still the same. 

I have big issues with some of the new FDA approvals---like the fat dog weight loss pill and some of the behavior modification drugs out there.   I've never seen a dog with normal thyroid function that wouldn't lose weight if you could get the owners to quit overfeeding them and actually get the dog out and let it get some exercise.  The owners are the culprit, not some weird physiology of the dog necessitating it to take a weightloss drug.   The same thing goes with behavior problems, although there are some that do require medication (such as severe storm anxiety or severe seperation anxiety), the majority of them can be dealt with by training, an appropriate level of exercise, and distraction--meaning activity to occupy the dogs mind. 

[~flower~]

The homeopathics consider that you are treating the cause and not the symptoms and taking the whole animal into consideration when choosing a remedy. 

I know quite a few that swear by homeopathy, but Classical Homeopathy, not the dry pellet, combination remedy, take this for this, practicing of homeopathy. 

  I have seen quite a few heated discussions on that topic!!   


  I try and keep an open mind and consider that everything MAY have it's place, be it allopathic medicines, herbs, or homeopathy.  I do not dismiss one modality as a whole, because I do not agree with some of it's parts.   

[Vet]

The homeopathics consider that you are treating the cause and not the symptoms and taking the whole animal into consideration when choosing a remedy. 

I know, but this is exactly what you should also do with "western medicine".  Treating the symptoms without considering the cause is malpractice as far as I'm concerned.  My wife and I were both trained that to effectively prescribe medication you must consider the following with every patient:

1) the signalment of the patient---age, sex, physical condition or any other intrensic factors with that species/specific patient that may affect drug metabolism
2) consider any concurrent or underlying illnesses which may alter the desired drugs effects
3) be able to fully justify without question why a specific medication is being prescribed--this includes dose, route (by mouth, by injection, topically), and frequency of administration----for example is it worth a 3 times per day antibiotic in a bird that will freak out when handled and become significantly stressed or would once per day be more appropriate.
4) be able to define the desired effects of that medication and when you expect it to begin having an effect
5) define all potential negative effects of the medication, especially those specific to the patient as a result of concurrent medications or underlying disease
6) define the endpoint of treatment---ie do you stop antibiotics when the fever goes away or when the abcess is fully healed?

If you can't do all 6 of those things, then the medication probably shouldn't be prescribed and you need to rethink why you were thinking about it in the first place.

Now again, I'll be the first to agree there are "McDonalds" veterinarians out there who don't do that, but there are others who do--and I know that the two of us quiz the crap out of our students and interns and my wife tortures her residents with driving home those points.

I know quite a few that swear by homeopathy, but Classical Homeopathy, not the dry pellet, combination remedy, take this for this, practicing of homeopathy. 

  I have seen quite a few heated discussions on that topic!!   


  I try and keep an open mind and consider that everything MAY have it's place, be it allopathic medicines, herbs, or homeopathy.  I do not dismiss one modality as a whole, because I do not agree with some of it's parts.   

yeah, it gets pretty darned opinionated.... and again, it all boils down to what I tried to say earlier with some of the "herbal" remedies...  it doesnt' matter if you are giving your dog 20 digitalis leaves or one digoxin tablet, you are still administering something to alter its physiology.   

[rockyfortune]

what about heartworm meds...i give me dogs heartworm and that flea and tick stuff you put on at the shoulder blades..is this bad stuff too?!

[Vet]

what about heartworm meds...i give me dogs heartworm and that flea and tick stuff you put on at the shoulder blades..is this bad stuff too?!

   It depends on who you ask.    

[jmt1]

what about heartworm meds...i give me dogs heartworm and that flea and tick stuff you put on at the shoulder blades..is this bad stuff too?!

ive been trying to decide that one also. 

for the time being i give my dog her heartworm meds only in the colder months and space them out every 45 days instead of 30. with the flea and
tick med i will only use it if she needs it.

[~flower~]

what about heartworm meds...i give me dogs heartworm and that flea and tick stuff you put on at the shoulder blades..is this bad stuff too?!

I personally use and give NOTHING.    This really is a personal decision based on where you live and your circumstances.  If you go to the Vaccination/Heartworm sticky you will find more information and links.

  Heartworm meds are labeled to be given every 30 days.   Per their own studies they are just as effective if given every 45 days (and one study concluded 60 days) and your pet gets less poison.  Because heartworm and flea  meds are poisons.   Me and Vet have gone back and forth on this (you will see the exchanges in the thread I mentioned) and he pointed out that the guarantee will not be valid if you do not give the heartworm meds per the label directions (every 30 days).  Something to consider, but if it was me and I wanted to use heartworm meds I would still give it every 45 days anyways and on the very very very very remote chance they contracted heartworm, lie.      Depending on where you live and your mosquito season, heartworm may not be the danger that it is proclaimed to be. 


 This is a perfect example of "Big Pharma".  Big Pharma decides to say to give it every 30 days because it is easier to remember and also makes them more money.  They conveniently will void their guarantee if you do not administer it according to their 30 day schedule.  So the pet owner is not given ALL the information and unknowingly gives their pet more POISON then they have too.

  I find this practice disgusting, not only because the pet owner is unaware of all the information, but so are a large number of vets.  Which is why I, and an increasing number of people are educating themselves.  With the internet it is relatively easy to find actual studies and information that is not given to you when you are given treatment options, either because your vet is not aware of the current information, or has made the decision for you as to what you need or do not need to know. 

 More and more drugs, chemicals and poisons are pushed every year, so it is even more important to be proactive in getting ALL the information before deciding what is best for your companion.