Alternative medicine includes everything from acupuncture to vitamins, to herbal medicine. Much of it depends on so called 'natural' products, as opposed to those medicines that are concocted in labs and approved through testing through the FDA. For the purposes of this article the discussion will cover neutraceuticals exclusively. Neutraceuticals include vitamins, herbs, naturally occuring substances such as melatonin and the like.
Many proponants of neutraceuticals believe that these products work and that the FDA, doctors, and pharmaceutical companies are conspiring to keep people away from them to keep the pharmaceutical companies in business. Recent calls by the FDA to regulate these products has only amped up these theories.
On the other side of the aisle, pharmaceutical companies, doctors, and scientists are afraid that neutraceutical manufacturers, having no oversight, and free to make any claims they want about their products, are a hazard to the public. They see these companies as no better than old fashioned snake oil salesmen (who actually squeezed 'oil' out of snakes, mixed it with alcohol and sold these as cures for everything from impotance to brain tumors.)
In veterinary medicine, most vets who prescribe neutraceuticals also work within the parameters of western medicine. As an example, in a local Tucson area hospital where several doctors worked, one doctor had a thriving practice of providing Chinese Herbs as well as various supplemental herbals. Clients walking in with Valley Fever always left with Fluconazole, but the Chinese Herbalist would also provide Milk Thistle (for liver health - Fluconazole is tough on the liver), and an immune booster comprised of mushroom extracts. Did these dogs do better? Who knows, the owners certainly thought so, or they wouldn't have paid nearly twice as much for their medications as other dogs being treated for the same disease.
First, some terms need to be defined. For the purpose of this article a drug is any substance that has an effect on physiology. As neutraceuticals purport to affect physiology, they are for the purposes of this article drugs. After all, if something has no affect on physiology how can it possibly help anyting? If vitamin C is to keep people from getting colds, it must do so by doing something to the body, affecting it in some way, otherwise, you may as well eat cheese, or as one veterinarian said flippantly of another veterinarian's treatment, "you may as well piss in their ear."
If drugs affect physiology they will affect it in more than one way, these are termed side effects, because they run along side the desired effect. As an exaple, the desired effect of the drug caffeine is alertness, the side effects are jitteriness, disrupted sleep, increased urination, and elevated heart rate. Likewise, asprin, a very innocuous seeming drug distilled from the bark of willows, it is a non steroidal anti inflammatory, that is the desired effect, the effects that run along side it are impaired clotting times (blood thinning - this is why heart attack patients take it), increases the risk of gastric ulcers, stomach bleeding, and tinnitus. In children it can cause a syndrome called Reyes, a potentially fatal condition.
Drugs are also dose dependant. Take a little bit of caffeine and you feel fine, take a lot and things go badly, caffeine overdose can cause anything from irregular heartbeat to convulsions. Too much asprin can cause seizures and coma.
Natural is also a word used a lot to describe neutraceuticals, as though naturally equates to better. A chemical is a chemical is a chemical, and it doesn't matter where it is made, whether a laboratory or a plant. Arsenic is arsenic, and whether steeped from willow trees or eaten in a pill, asprin is asprin.
Except for one caveat. If your doctor wishes you to take digitalis for your heart he will not feel comfortable with you growing foxglove and gnawing on it for its digitalis. Again, this comes down to dose. As anyone who has eaten jalepenos or green chiles knows, the amount of capsaicin from one fruit to another differs enormously. Plants are different from one another, and differ from year to year, and may even have differing amounts of a drug in different parts of the plant, the drug may also move from part to part as the season progresses.
So, putting it all together, a drug changes physiology, it has effects that are desired, and effects that are not. Due to the fact that drugs affect pysiology, they are dose dependant. Take too little and nothing happens, take too much and possibly die. Natural chemicals are fine, but plants are unreliable when it comes to dosing.
So, nueutraceuticals that offfer up cures with no side effects, probably have no effect in the first place. This seems to be a simple equation, that many people miss. They are drawn in by the no side affects lure, but forget that there is no such thing as a drug offering no side effects. Sorry, they do not exist, they cannot if the drug has any physiological effect on the body at all.
Second, as was demonstrated earlier with the discussion of plants and dosing, there is the reason asprin isn't sold as ground willow. No one can control the dose. This isn't a con by the Bayer Company to keep you from harvesting your own, it's to make a product that has enough drug to be effective and too little to be dangerous.
So plant extracts in pills, pass them up. They offer nothing, or too much, or who knows what. And if someone tells you they are safe regardless how much of the actual drug is in it then you're back to dose dependancy, no drug is safe if you consume too much.
Neutraceuticals are not regulated. Anyone with a bunch of empty capsules can run down to the feed store and fill them with chicken feed and be in the neutraceutical business. Neutraceutical sales is an 86 billion dollar industry. They do not want regulation because they would have to prove their products work scientfically. They say that there is no money in a non patentable plant sourced medicine (like tobacco, coffee, chocolate, cocaine, and opium). When the government attempts regulation they claim that the feds are trying to interfere in people's right to choose their own healthcare.
Of course, this affects everyone, not just your pet. But the use of neutraceuticals in pets is more dangerous than their use in us. Just as birds are not affected by capcaisin (cannot taste the 'hot' in peppers), cats cannot properly process asprin and can suffer fatal overdoses at even small amounts. Even though most plant compounds have been safely ingested by humans for millenia does not mean that they are safe for pets. So, use extreme caution when using human neutraceuticals in pets, especially since real drugs are dose dependant.
Tomorrow this column with discuss the dangers of the placebo effect on pet health.
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