What is Integrative Medicine?

We often get calls requesting more information on what being an integrative veterinary hospital means. What exactly does that mean? Does that mean we don’t believe in vaccines? Does that mean we don’t believe in using medications? Does it mean we heal pets with our good vibes? The short answer is no, that is not what it means to be an integrative hospital. Well...maybe the good vibes help.  So lets dive in. What does being an integrative hospital actually mean?

First, let’s start with the basics. Western medicine focuses on treating diseases, ailment, and symptoms with various medications, drug therapies, and/or surgery (if required). Western doctors treat symptoms in hopes to cure. The primary focus is to identify and treat that specific disease, illness, or condition.

Holistic medicine or alternative medicine looks at the whole body. Eastern medicine, often referred to as “Traditional Chinese Medicine” is one of the oldest branches of holistic medicine. This is an ancient practice of medicine used to balance the body using various tools such as acupuncture, Chinese herbal therapy, supplements, nutraceuticals, nutrition, food energy therapy, and other alternative modalities within the 5 branches to treat the underlying imbalances. The main focus of holistic medicine is to help the patient as a whole, treat at the root, and help prevent illness or disease before its too late.

Integrative medicine has a number of definitions, but in general it combines conventional western medicine with holistic/alternative medicine. Each health plan that is created for your pet is specific to your pets needs and lifestyle. We feel this approach to health and wellness gives the most optimal treatment plans and healing for your pet. The two can complement each other in ways that can truly optimize your pets well being. Now to dive into some examples of what we do at Roots.

Vaccinations: 

Western and conventional veterinary medicine strongly believe in routine/annual vaccinations. While vaccinations have a time and place to be used to help prevent a disease, we feel they are often overused or misused when given to pets with underlying medical conditions. The integrative, more holistic approach is to assess the pets life style, discuss options and make decisions based off of that information. We are strong advocates for vaccine titer testing after a pet has been properly vaccinated as a puppy.  A titer test measures immunity levels in the system. We will dive in deeper to titer testing in another blog post. Titer testing can prevent over vaccinating, avoiding vaccinations in pets with underlying medical conditions, and prevent triggering an over inflammatory response in the body. We do our best to educate you on the vaccines, the virus or bacteria itself, and when/how to vaccinate what we feel is appropriate. 

Nutrition: 

If you were to make an appointment to see Dr. Lassin, one of the first questions our team or he will ask you is what are you feeding your pet?  In western veterinary medicine the most common foods recommended are from larger companies that mainly use feed grade as a core of their diets. These same companies also make prescription diets using the same by-product based ingredients to to treat disease/ailment.  In holistic and eastern medicine, ingredients matter. At Roots we try to take what we know for ourselves and apply it to our pets. Therefore, we believe that various ingredients can be used to help decrease inflammation while others can promote it. Food is not only used to treat disease, more importantly it can be used to prevent disease. What goes in your pets body matters. Food is medicine and we highly suggest reading Big Kibble to learn more on this topic.

Acupuncture: 

Acupuncture is a form of treatment to help many diseases and ailments such as joint pain, back issues, seizures, cancer and so much more. As an example, if your pet has been diagnosed with a malignant (cancerous) tumor, outside of chemo or radiation, many pets would benefit tremendously with acupuncture to support the immune system to fight cancer, can prevent nausea from chemotherapy, and/or pain. Acupuncture will help detox the body from the cancer and chemotherapy. Using integrative medicine to combine the two in this specific situation is an option we feel every pet should have and gives a better quality of life. 

Now if you were around in the 90’s you probably had a Yin Yang plastered on your backpack, or some sort of jewelry with a smiley face and a peace sign. But did you really know the meaning behind it? Uhhh yah.  Us either. It was just the cool thing to do.

So here we are to blow your mind and make sense of that yin yang symbol. According to ancient.eu the principle of the Yin Yang is that all things exist as inseparable and contradictory opposites, for example, female-male, dark-light, hot-cold, and old-young. It's about balance and complementing each other. This is the best representation of the type of integrative medicine we like to practice at Roots. Dr. Lassin uses his 10 years of veterinary medical education in western and eastern practices to help heal patients from their roots. 

One of the biggest misconceptions of being an integrative practice is that we only practice or treat holistically. This is simply not true. If you read this far in our blog you can see that we do vaccinate pets appropriately, we do use drugs to treat diseases when needed, we do refer to our fellow colleagues in specialty medicine, but most importantly we listen and ask questions to really understand your pets case. Each pet that comes to see us has a unique treatment plan. The only way to achieve this is to ask our clients all the questions and then give our medical recommendations and options. It's up to the client to choose the best path for their pet. 

We believe in getting to the ROOT of your pets issues. Root Cause, Root Nutrition, Root Wellness. Every animal is different, meaning some treatments that work for some animals may not work for others. Integrative medicine is finding the beautiful balance between alternative, eastern, and western medicine. Using them in ways in which they complement each other to treat the WHOLE pet, and not just their symptoms. We have clients who lean more towards the western side, but also use supplements and herbals. We have some clients who lean more to the eastern side, but their pets will be on pharmaceuticals to manage a certain disease. 

What’s most important to us is that you are all heard and are a part of your pets health journey. We hope this helps you understand the type of medicine we like to practice here at Roots.