Holistic Veterinary Medicine: A Holistic View of Functional Medicine

Veterinarians (vets) are trained to diagnose and treat animal diseases; and they are usually the best people to do so. This means that they are the best to find excessive symptoms, which are symptoms that express pain, inflammations and degeneration. This book teaches to find deficient symptoms, and in this aspect veterinarians are not necessarily the best diagnostics. They may be so, but then they have to educate themselves in a way described in this book. In my opinion, detecting deficient symptoms, lay-people may as good as the veterinarian. This book can be used by the veterinarian as a reference on Complementary Veterinary Medicine, and give useful information on how to treat sick animals; it is not intended for use as a "Cookbook" on how to treat animals. Both veterinarians and not-veterinarians must understand this; otherwise they may use it (possibly in vain) only to find a recipe to heal, for example, chronic mastitis in their favourite cow, or lameness in their horse or dog. If they do so, they will miss the whole purpose of the book, which is to give readers basic information on Holistic Veterinary Medicine, based on the detection of deficient processes. The book aims to introduce readers to the concepts of Fundamental Processes from which many holistic therapies have developed, how these methods function and how they can be put to practical use to treat sick animals. In order to be able to cope with the huge and expanding market of healers, quacks, methods and aids offered today, it is very important to be able to think in a holistic way. Only by going deeply into the principles of holistic thinking can we give our animals the best treatment and be able to recognise the many charlatans in the area for what they are. Only when one has studied and grasped the basic thinking processes of holistic medicine can one use its schemata, recipes or cookbook prescriptions with good conscience. Therefore a list of therapeutic suggestions is included after the chapters on acupuncture (AP) and homeopathy. Every method in this book is discussed in three different ways: first the -Theoretical thought processes, then the -Practical thought processes and finally -Therapeutic suggestions, i.e. recipes and schemata and other necessary details. For those especially interested, I have included -Philosophical and theoretical approaches in several places. These are printed in italics and marked with an old Celtic sign at the beginning and end. I hope that English speakers will welcome this updated translation of the second Norwegian edition, and that the book will lead to discussion of a better way to improve animal well being and health world-wide.