Any experience with 'Chinese medicine'?

[gcv-border]

I am not sure if I am using the correct terminology (Chinese medicine). [After reading this, feel free to provide a correction.]

 

(This topic seems to be somewhat related to the recent posting by D'Elle since it also involves quality of life for a senior dog. I was interested to read the other postings.)

 

My 17+ year old anxious, fearful, sound-sensitive rescued Sheltie mix (maybe she has lived with PTSD?? based on my recent readings, but that is another topic) has shown increasing anxiety for the past couple of months. She would pant and pace for 15-20 minutes at a time - usually once a day and sometimes several times a day. The time and frequency seemed to be increasing as time went by.

 

I have a couple of friends who consulted with a local vet (Western-trained) who now specializes in Chinese medicine for pets exclusively. They had successful outcomes so I thought why not? I felt I wanted to first try some holistic or homeopathic or Chinese or other natural method to give my old girl some peace since her issues seemed mostly related to anxiety, and not physical. At her age, I am just looking to give her a good quality of life, and she was very stressed with her increasing anxiety level.

 

I must admit, I have seen a definite improvement in her attitude and appetite and also a significant decrease in her pacing (almost nonexistent now). I started noticing a change within a couple of days, but wasn't sure that I was observing a 'real' effect. Three weeks later, I guess I have to admit that the changes are real.

 

Anyone else use Chinese medicine to help their dog? What has been your experience? In my case, I started with waving a smoking moxa stick (think an incense stick) over my dog (yeah, it sounds very weird), and now the vet has added in an herbal called 'Supple Spine' and has cancelled the moxa stick since my dog started to move away from it after using it for 7-10 days whereas she would calmly stand or lie down for it at first. She told me that my dog was 'coo'l, and she would attempt to balance her.

 

One of my friends admits that she has 'drunk the koolaid'. She truly believes in this approach since this vet 'cured'? her Flat Coat of a nasty tumor (I don't know what kind) with Chinese herbals and a raw diet. The tumor disappeared over a period of 8-9 months.

 

My dog's (Ritz) condition and diagnosis and treatment is a bit more complicated than presented here, but I just wanted to put forward a bit of what is going on and ask if anyone else has tried the Chinese medicine approach - for any issue with their dog or cat or themselves.

 

Happy New Year!

 

 

[GentleLake]

I haven't had much experience myself, but a long time friend from where used to live is a vet who's gone from a traditional allopathic practice to a completely holistic one now. She started by studying acupuncture when there were no veterinary acupuncture classes available. She does some homeopathy and Western herbal medicine, but most of her practice is Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM, the "correct" term I think you're looking for).

 

TCM has ancient roots that have persisted for much longer than allopathic medicine has been around. Seems to me there must be something to it, and there's scientific evidence now that acupuncture does work, although how it works is still a mystery.

 

I know there are some things like beliefs that rhino horn will cure all sorts of things that are bunk, but there's also been a lot of hooey in Western medicine, too, so I'm not willing to throw the baby out with the bathwater, so to speak.

 

In situations like this I always think of what Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet: "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy."

[Smalahundur]

Seems to me there must be something to it, and there's scientific evidence now that acupuncture does work, although how it works is still a mystery.

 

Is there? I thought so far nothing beyond placebo effect had been assessed.

I am deeply skeptical towards TCM, and well most of the alternative, or if you like buzzwords, the "holistic" sector.

Well, honestly I think it is all pretty much nonsense.

But come up with some methodologically sound, double blind, peer reviewed scientific research that says otherwise, and I will change that opinion immediately.

[GentleLake]

I'm not going to spend a lot of time searching for info on this, but here's one article that refers to a meta-study that found acupucture to be more than just a placebo: http://www.livescience.com/29494-acupuncture.html

 

I've seen other articles referring to studies on acupuncture having been proved to relieve OA in knees.

[Gideon's girl]

My friend has a vet that does TCVM(Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine). She just recently found this vet, so I don't have much to go by(We have nothing even close in my area), but her dog was having repeat ear infections and eye drainage only on one side of the body. It had been going on for a couple years. The TCVM vet said the lymph system was blocked on that side, did acupuncture, and the eye drainage and ear infections went away and have been gone for just shy of a year now.

 

Many of the medicines we have today are based on the effects noticed from taking certain plants, so why not go back to taking the plants instead. Herbal healers say that the plants don't have all the side effects that the synthetic drugs have.

[Smalahundur]

@Gentlelake

Quote from your link: "these differences are relatively modest." That is between "sham" and "true" acupuncture, this automatically means that "double blindness" is rather difficult to achieve, throwing the door wide open for placebo effect.

 

And as for your second remark I have seen quite some studies not showing any effect of acupuncture beyond said placebo effect.

 

I hope you won´t mind I am staying skeptical...

[GentleLake]

I hope you won´t mind I am staying skeptical...

 

Not at all. To each her or his own. . . .

[D'Elle]

Is there? I thought so far nothing beyond placebo effect had been assessed.

I am deeply skeptical towards TCM, and well most of the alternative, or if you like buzzwords, the "holistic" sector.

Well, honestly I think it is all pretty much nonsense.

But come up with some methodologically sound, double blind, peer reviewed scientific research that says otherwise, and I will change that opinion immediately.

I had the same opinion, Smalahunder, until I took my cat to a homeopathic vet. Three allopathic vets had seen him and I had spent a lot of time and money on various medicines to no effect. The homeopathic medicine cured him in two days and he never had a recurrence of the issue.

Cats are not affected by placebo effect.

 

I have had similarly good results with homeopathic remedies applied to myself (although mostly only when prescribed by a trained practitioner). Maybe that's placebo effect, who knows.........but I don't give a rip if it works!

 

Recently I took Kit to a naturopathic vet who did acupuncture on her and she was like a brand new dog for a few days.

Dogs don't know nothin' 'bout placebo effect either.

 

Me, I don't argue with success!

Don't need to know how it works if it simply does.

 

But, I will also say that I am basically a skeptic and if I had not had personal experience to change my mind I would still be thinking that all those things are woo-woo.

So I don't ever critique anyone for not trusting it if they have not had a positive experience with it.

[Smalahundur]

Hey, if it works, it works, and I am happy for you your animals got better.

 

But anecdotal data is by its nature iffy, and as you say yourself, you can´t argue with succes .

[juliepoudrier]

I can buy placebo effects with humans, but since animals have no expectation of help from treatment, I don't see how a placebo effect can really be attributed to animals who improve after treatment with acupuncture or other holistic treatments. I save my skepticism for homeopathy, but that's sort of another topic.

 

I use a combination of allopathic and holistic, depending on the situation and what makes sense to me given my pet's situation. I used an alternative treatment on my dog's mast cell tumor, and honestly it removed most of the tumor (not all, largely due to location and difficulty keeping the neoplasene in contact with the tumor). The rest was removed with surgery, followed by multiple allopathic treatments (various different meds, none of which performed any better, and some worse, than the original alternative treatment). In the end I stopped treating her altogether and several months after stopping all treatment, she went into remission.

 

I have other anecdotal examples with other dogs, but I think this is one of those things where you have to be open minded enough to try and see if there's a positive result.

 

But for a balanced presentation, I will add that when I tried Chinese herbs on my epileptic dog, they had no positive effect. The vet did warn me, though, that Chinese herbs alone generally wouldn't control seizures, but when used in combination with traditional anti-seizure drugs could allow one to reduce the dosage of the traditional meds. I was trying to avoid going to the traditional meds, but in the end I had to do so and my dog has been well controlled (seizure free) since going the allopathic route.

 

In my situation, a tumor disappearing or a dog with FCE coming back from paralysis (after electroacupuncture--FWIW, the allopathic vet said we could try back surgery, but the prognosis wouldn't be good) are not placebo effects. One might come up with other possible reasons for the positive outcomes, but placebo isn't one of them.

 

J.

[simba]

Apologies if this gets long- I have a huge interest in history of medicine and traditional medical practices.

 

A friend used lots of traditional chinese herbs, recommended by a long-time practitioner, to help a horse with lameness. That was four years ago. The horse is still lame. That's not enough by itself to say they don't work, obviously- it's just an anecdote.

 

Herbal pracitioners say that the drugs in herbs work synergistically, but there's no reason to think that this happens routinely, or any reason to think this would happen at all. Herbal remedies are thought to be less safe due to the fact that they're 'dirty drugs'- along with the drug you want you get a lot of other drugs in variable quantities. Then too the amount of active ingredient varies a lot- think of wine, grow the same grapes in different places and you'll get different tastes. Plants develop differently in different soils, climates, at different ages. Herbal remedies sold in the US often don't actually have the active substance in them at all, or have it in widely varying amounts. A lot of them don't even have the right plants.

 

The placebo effect is not the only reason we get better after taking placebos, or even the major one, and animals do get something like a placebo effect. I find it hard to believe a sufficiently intelligent dog wouldn't pick up somewhat on the owner's expectations, leaving aside the fact that it's the owner who's observing the symptoms. There are lots of reasons why an animal might get better after an ineffective remedy, and just because a remedy is effective doesn't mean it's also safe.

 

There have been lots of drugs taken off the market that worked for the intended purpose, but had side-effects which outweighed the benefit, and which were only noticeable when you systematically collected data over a huge population of people.

 

Aristolochia covers a family of plants, some of which are widely-used in traditional chinese medicine and cause cancer and renal failure. Or at least were widely used until 1993, when the risks were finally recorded and reported. So if there's an aristolochia incident for dogs, who will notice? Or how many are still out there, and just haven't caused such a dramatic incident yet?

 

What I find interesting is how much of what's thought of as traditional chinese medicine was only come up with in the last hundred or so years. That, and how similar a lot of traditional practices (cupping, moxibustion, the bloodletting from specific places which preceded modern acupuncture) are to traditional practices in the UK and Ireland.

 

The thing about trying these things for myself is that for a lot of remedies it's essentially experimenting on my dog with something that I don't know is safe or effective. And even if it works, I still don't know, because it could 'work' the same way bloodletting did for all its satisfied customers. Or it could have other side-effects I wouldn't know about, and might never know about unless it's something obvious and visible in a short time.

Even if everything goes perfectly, and it does happen to work as intended and be perfectly safe, I still haven't established that, and I still don't know that. It's an anecdote.

 

Medicines reported to work for lots of people, widely used, which have 'stood the test of time', have been tested and found to be no better than placebo. If it didn't happen we wouldn't need to test as much, to distinguish between baby and bathwater.

 

Sorry if any of this sounds abrasive, it's not meant to. I just picked out a few points I found interesting in this well-reasoned discussion.

[D'Elle]

I find it hard to believe that my cat picked up on my expectations and so got better........especially as I went somewhat under protestation to the homeopath, and was fully prepared to denounce her as a quack. And if it were a case of picking up on expectation, I wonder why he did not get better when I took him to three other vets.

 

Still, your points have validity, Simba. Just because someone gets better after a certain thing doesn't actually prove that the remedy caused them to get better. It could be coincidence.

 

I had an appointment to have an animal communicator ( I know, I know.....don't start.....I was desperate.... ) talk to my cats a few weeks ago because they were fighting all the time and peeing in the house. The appointment ended up getting cancelled, but in the same week that I was supposed to have had the appointment, the cats suddenly started getting along and the peeing outside the box stopped, and has not been a problem since. If I had had the session with the communicator, I am sure I would have automatically attributed the improvement to her work. So perhaps you never really know.

. I find it hard to believe a sufficiently intelligent dog wouldn't pick up somewhat on the owner's expectations, leaving aside the fact that it's the owner who's observing the symptoms.

[simba]

D'Elle: I'm not suggesting it's the only or even the major reason it happens, or that it applies to your cat. It was more of a 'musing aloud' response to the general idea that animals don't get placebo effects.

 

I love those moments when the animals suddenly fix the problem. Why can't they do that all the time?

[urge to herd]

Sorry if any of this sounds abrasive, it's not meant to. I just picked out a few points I found interesting in this well-reasoned discussion.

Oh, Simba, I'm in love with you! Yes to everything you said. In addition:

 

I think we often confuse coincidence with causality. If my dog gets better after I give it a TCM cure, then the TCM cure must have made it happen. Not true.

 

Trusting the Chinese manufacturing processes with herbal supplements seems to me to be asking for trouble. There have been recalls done on dog food and treats that were made in China, and it seems for good reason. You really think that kindly folk are out gathering and processing only good stuff to sell to Westerners as medical treatments? I've got a bridge I could sell you.

 

Here's where I go out on a limb - the practitioner him/herself might make a huge difference. Some people have a gift of something or other. Can't be defined, not yet anyway, but some rare individuals seem to be actual healers.

 

As for TCM itself, or any primitive method of medical treatment, let us not forget how high the mortality rate was 100 years ago. They were practicing TCM then, and it didn't save the women who died in childbirth, or the people who died of infection from small wounds, or died from filthy water.

 

Simba, thanks so much for your reply.

 

Ruth and Agent Gibbs

[GentleLake]

 

 

As for TCM itself, or any primitive method of medical treatment, let us not forget how high the mortality rate was 100 years ago. They were practicing TCM then, and it didn't save the women who died in childbirth,

 

And the US, with all its "advanced" medicine ranks pretty low on the scale for infant mortality in developed countries and for humans pretty high in chronic illnesses.

 

None of these medical approaches is perfect, including allopathic medicine.

[Smalahundur]

Unusual argument, do you think imperfect "allopathic" (why use a term invented by homeopaths for regular medicine?) medicine is responsible for the relatively high infant mortality rate in the US? I find that hard to believe.

[simba]

GentleLake- that's an interesting observation. The next question is- does increased use of alternative medicine correlate with lower infant mortality? Otherwise the statistic doesn't inform us about so-called 'allopathic' medicine.

 

Infant mortality is defined differently in the US compared to in most European countries which accounts for some of the difference. You also tend to have more pre-term infants and lower health care coverage. Your neonatal mortality rates aren't bad compared to other countries.

[Maralynn]

 

As for TCM itself, or any primitive method of medical treatment, let us not forget how high the mortality rate was 100 years ago. They were practicing TCM then, and it didn't save the women who died in childbirth, or the people who died of infection from small wounds, or died from filthy water.

 

 

 

But then again, it was the allopathic medicine of the time that was responsible for many of those deaths The Doctors Plague.

 

I know it's progressed by leaps and bounds since that era and I'll chose allopathic over alternative treatments for the most part. But a hundred or more years ago it was ALL a lot more primitive.

[juliepoudrier]

Since I can't get the quote function to work, nor can I seem to copy and paste, I'm just going to make some comments and move on.

 

I will say this: when I treat any of my animals for an illness, I generally don't have any expectations. I often fail to see improvement when using the same remedies that others have found to be very effective, so much so, that at times I have wondered if my skepticism is preventing me from seeing improvements in my animals.

 

When I was treating Willow for mast cell cancer and we were on our 5th and final treatment regimen I remember telling the oncologist that I could see no positive effects from treatment. His answer was that although the medication might not be knocking the tumor back, perhaps it was preventing it from growing. Well, yes, I suppose, except that a similar drug had actually knocked it back. So was my low expectation causing my dog not to respond to the medication?

 

Likewise, when the meds made her very ill and I decided to stop treating altogether and just go with palliative care, my expectation was that we were entering the last stages of her life. While I was expecting her to be fading, she went into remission. So if I am to believe that my expectations are understood and responded to by my pets, then I guess in this case, Willow was just a very poor study.

 

I think dogs can read our moods/emotions, but I don't think they can interpret our expectations for their recovery via certain treatment regimes. If that were the case, then we'd all be curing our dogs with nothing more than great expectations.... (IMO)

 

I'm not an advocate of any form of medical treatment over another. I generally use allopathic medicine to treat my dogs, but when that hasn't worked or seemed sufficient I have also sought alternative treatments. And sometimes I've used a combination of both. I judge whether something works based on what I can see happening with my own animal (whom I know better than anyone else, so if anyone could see subtle or not-so-subtle improvement or decline, it should be me). That's what makes sense to me.

 

J.

[Alchemist]

Y'now, I'm a scientist by training. This means I don't lean one way or another in favor of any particular means of treatment, until you show me the double-blind studies that prove that something is effective (or ineffective)...

 

I'd always been privately skeptical about treatments such as acupuncture, telling myself privately it was surely a placebo effect that made it seem to be successful as applied to human patients. But then I took my dog in for acupuncture a few years back, when he was suffering from CHD.

 

For sure I don't know whether it was the acupuncture, the meds we were giving him, the PT, the progression with age... all I can attest to is that after the first visit, when he was clearly extremely nervous, wanted to sniff all the needles about to go into him... It didn't matter. SOMETHING worked, and he showed visible improvement within weeks. He totally passed out during the first treatment, completely blissed out for a good half an hour. Totally out of character for him at that age. And thereafter, he was incredibly pleased when we arrived at the canine acupuncturists, seemed perfectly calm, offered the acupuncturist great affection, then lay down calmly to accept the needles, then passed out in comfort for quite a while.

 

I'd be a poor scientist if I allowed my anti-traditional-Chinese medicine bias to stand in the way of accepting that he really seemed to enjoy the treatment he was receiving. While noting that a "placebo effect" really shouldn't be a factor with dogs.

 

Many active pharmaceutical agents derive from natural products (whether used in traditional Chinese medicine or other cultures). I try to suspend prejudices.

[simba]

'Allopathic' is a funny term. It basically means everything that isn't 'homeopathic' medicine, although by rights it should mean treating something with its opposite (for example treating a burn by immediately cooling the area.) So TCM is allopathic according to the people who invented the term, and shares more features and ideas with the 'allopathic' medicine of a hundred years ago or more, particularly around the 1600s when a lot of the same or similar 'remedies' were used, than that 1600s medicine does with modern medicine.

 

It's also used to mean modern medicine, but doesn't cover modern (if not evidence-based) western ideas like homeopathy and chiropractic, the herbal medicine that doesn't have good evidence behind it, and modern eastern ideas like acupuncture in its current forms. It's based less on shared characteristics of the things described than ideology.

 

I know this sounds pedantic but it's a good example of how words can be used in an attempt to create distinctions or categories that don't really exist. So you have traditional Chinese medicine, which is similar to traditions across the world and a lot of which isn't really traditional. And you have the AKC border collie, which isn't. It's the same story.

[GentleLake]

(From: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/allopathic) al·lo·path·icadjective \ˌa-lə-ˈpa-thik\

Definition of ALLOPATHIC

: relating to or being a system of medicine that aims to combat disease by using remedies (as drugs or surgery) which produce effects that are different from or incompatible with those of the disease being treated

Origin of ALLOPATHIC

German allopatisch, from Allopathie an allopathic system of medicine, from allo- all- + -pathie -pathy

First Known Use: 1830

-----------

Definition of Allopathic medicine (From: http://www.medterms.com/script/main/art.asp?articlekey=33612)

Allopathic medicine: Allopathic medicine refers broadly to medical practice that is also termed Western medicine, evidence-based medicine, or modern medicine.

 

The term "allopathy" was coined in 1810 by Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843) to designate the usual practice of medicine (allopathy) as opposed to homeopathy, the system of therapy that he founded. (Emphasis added.)

------------

 

I sincerely doubt that in 1830 Hahnemann was including TCM, a practice that wouldn't have been widely known and certainly not considered "usual" at the time, nor chiropractic, which hadn't been invented for another 65 years.

 

Certainly the meaning of words changes over time (consider that "virtuous" in the 14th century referred to male virility, the opposite of it's current application largely to chase women), but I don't think it's at all out of line, misleading or inaccurate to think that the modern usage of a word would be implied rather than one that was in use almost 200 years ago.

 

 

 

[G. Festerling]

I have a wonderful upbringing that makes me question everything. Even myself!

But I don't do studies very well. For the most part they open more questions for me than answer them.

 

In my own care I have found a great vet who is one of the rare people that can put things in wonderful perspective.

I use TCM, I use drugs, I use manipulation.

 

In my experience, the one to bring the most noticeable effects, is traditional medicine.

Then the manipulations like chiro and accupuncture, laser, contditoning etc (and yes, I very unscientifically lump them all together). I have also taken all of those myself so placebo or not...I know what it did and did not do for me!

Followed by the TCM.

 

The very best results I have found in various combinations of the above. PLUS nutrition.

[mtnfrank]

And the US, with all its "advanced" medicine ranks pretty low on the scale for infant mortality in developed countries and for humans pretty high in chronic illnesses.

 

None of these medical approaches is perfect, including allopathic medicine.

 

hum.... could it be instead because access to 'advanced' medicine, pre-natal and neo-natal care is much more limited in the US vs other rich countries? Healthcare costs and infant mortaility are lower in socialist-communist-freedom-hating Canada. For similar population and the same medicine we achieve better overal results at a lower cost. The difference is access (and yes some people do better in the US if they can afford it and not everyone in Canada does well, for example our first nations who unfortunately and somewhat shamefuly for us have infant mortality more in line with third world countries)

 

No intending to offend anyone with the following paragraphs... reader beware strong pro-science bias follows...

 

Homeopathy = quackery and complete scham with no basis in chemistry, biology, physics or any known science

 

allopathic = made up word by the founder of homeopathy. Ethymology is not german (?seriously Webster???) but greek 'allos' = different, 'pathos' = souffrance (or illness). Thus treatment (according to homeopath) that uses things different from the suffering. With homeo (greek for same) would mean treating with the illness. Except not in the 'vaccine' or 'allergy treatment' kind of way, but in a pseudo-magical ultra-dilution of medicine known only to your 'Dr'. Thus complete quackery.

 

There is some traditional medicine (western, chinese or else) that uses plants with active elements with medecinal properties that obviously can treat some ailments. Two issues however:

1) Here in Canada, since it is not food nor medication, there is absolutely zero confidence that what you buy has what the package says it has since there is no regulatory framework apart from generic consumer protection. Pretty much every time a consumer group has sampled products they found that pretend and actual content were quite different.

2) if the active element is known, why not instead get it in a better studied and approved dosage in the form of, gasp, modern medicine?

 

The meta-study on acupuncture efficiency mentionned above was also found to have 'negligable clinical signification'. Meaning pretty much no better than placebo. Now, if one takes away all the energy flow mumbo-jumbo, there is a possibility that acupuncture could help with pain by stimulating the bodies own pain response (eg production of opioid in

the body, etc.) Certainly that can be investigated further but, then again might as well inject said analgesic instead!

 

Maybe I'm biased given that my sister has had to do neck surgery on people that had severe complications from neck manipulations, but I'm also very weary of any spinal manipulation. Massage, stretching, etc. sure that can help. Spine manipulation... to me that is way too dangerous, one puts his ability to walk or breathe in someone's hand....

 

It's not because people think something works or exist mean that it does. Convictions, anectodal evidence and resulting placebo/nocebo can be very strong. People traditionaly believed in leprechauns and fairies, now some believe in ghosts, UFOs and sasquatch. They have evidence and good arguments. Doesn't make it any more real.

 

I would certainly welcome better veterinary medicine, if I had a critique is that they often treat superficialy with a 'one presciption fits all' model and treat dog-cats-rabits-any other pet the same while they are quite different species (livestock is treated well, as livestock).

 

Discussion on placebo effects in animals:

www.sciencebasedmedicine.org/is-there-a-placebo-effect-for-animals

[simba]

Gentlelake:

 

My point wasn't that Hahnemann said that TCM was allopathic- it's that Hahnemann said that practices of medicine which were not homeopathy, were allopathy, and those practices which fall under the umbrella of TCM are not homeopathic and bear a closer resemblance to allopathy as he described it. That's all I was saying. I just found it funny that the definition has changed so drastically. I should have replaced 'basically' with 'originally'.

 

 

In the second paragraph I moved on to talking about the more modern usage, and chiropractic is often considered to be not allopathic. So is TCM now which is why I included it there.

 

I didn't mean to say anyone was out of line, misleading, or inaccurate- I was just saying that it's a fluid and nebulous concept which is not a guide to the origins or characteristics of the practices which get classed as one or the other. It's not a useful distinction to make, and it just confuses things.