Vital Animal Podcast

Essential Oil Know How, Dr. Janet Roark

May 17, 2023 20:00 - 31 minutes - 21.5 MB

#42 Dr. Janet Roark rightly calls herself the Essential Oil Vet. Newly graduated from vet school, she found herself in a deeply stressed state. Migraine headaches, classified by the allopaths as “ice pick migraines” (ouch!) forced her to take time off she didn’t want to take. Newly graduated, in a new practice, new work load, and chronic migraines accompanied with depression that drugs weren’t helping — what was she to do? One day, she found herself without drugs, suffering a crushing mi...

Dr. Rob Silver: Medicinal Mushrooms

April 26, 2023 09:00 - 39 minutes - 27 MB

#41 Dr. Rob Silver has worn many hats in his holistic career, most obviously as a practicing veterinarian of four decades, but also as an author, a CBD/cannabis expert, a supplement formulator, and lately, as a medicinal mushroom expert. Join us as we discuss the vast kingdom of mushrooms and some of their amazing health properties. Rob saw early successes with cases of cancer, but discovered by further study that mushrooms are far from a “one trick pony.” From their calming influence, to...

Are Viruses Real or Not?

March 29, 2022 06:00 - 16 minutes - 11.4 MB

#40: Against a backdrop of an admittedly wild couple of years with COVID-19, lockdowns, masking, vaccines rushed to market, and statistics that have been shown to be wildly manipulated, perhaps one of the most confusing things are self-proclaimed experts who proclaim confidently that viruses simply don’t exist. Now that I’ve had no less than three listeners wonder if that claim has any basis in fact, I think it’s time we looked more deeply into it. As one of the most fascinating diseases I...

Behind the scenes at Vital Pet Health

November 09, 2021 08:00 - 29 minutes - 20.3 MB

Vital Pet Health CEO, Jason Donas joins me to give us some big news in product development. It seems my friends in Vital Animal’s “sister company” have been busy reformulating to make your animal’s immune support and detox options really amazing. Jason explains the process of micronization and why it takes an expensive machine to accomplish it. Far more than mere filtering, this process makes your pet’s supplements instantly available and fully absorbed. Practically speaking, that transla...

#38: Behind the scenes at Vital Pet Health

November 09, 2021 08:00 - 29 minutes - 20.3 MB

Vital Pet Health CEO, Jason Donas joins me to give us some big news in product development. It seems my friends in Vital Animal’s “sister company” have been busy reformulating to make your animal’s immune support and detox options really amazing. Jason explains the process of micronization and why it takes an expensive machine to accomplish it. Far more than mere filtering, this process makes your pet’s supplements instantly available and fully absorbed. Practically speaking, that transla...

Fire Your Vet!

October 05, 2021 06:00 - 20 minutes - 14.4 MB

#039 When your vet pushes you into procedures you don’t want that are more risk than benefit, it’s time to FIRE him! Join me as I share a real life story (one of far too many I have) about a woman being held hostage by her vet. She was being told she had to revaccinate her already vaccinated dog in order to get insulin for this same dog. Scout’s had diabetes for 4 years… Learn why I recommend firing this vet, why more vaccines for this dog would be malpractice, and what you can do to get y...

Is Nosode Use Safe After Vaccines?

July 20, 2021 06:00 - 19 minutes - 13.6 MB

#037 As a homeopathic vet, I’m always puzzled when people ask if it’s safe to use homeopathic remedies after their animal has been given drugs or, in this case, vaccines. I’m really not sure what’s going through their heads in this, as the reality is there’s no safer medicine I’m aware of than these ultra diluted remedies. It’s the drugs or vaccinations I’m concerned about safety on! This episode grew out of such questions and I share with you some of the details of how remedies are made ...

Blood Tests: All You Need to Know?

June 22, 2021 06:00 - 13 minutes - 9.19 MB

#036 Are regular blood tests on your animal giving you a false sense of security? Might there be better ways to suss out your animal’s health status? Tune in to hear how a homeopathic vet thinks about these tests and even better, suggests something that’s even more powerful. And costs nothing out of pocket! These freebies were here long before we got all fancy with measuring blood, taking radiographs and doing MRIs or ultrasounds. These “measures” are really at the heart of our survival ...

How to Get Your Vet Needs Met

June 08, 2021 06:00 - 16 minutes - 11.3 MB

#035 I think it’s appropriate to say there is no more important place to be clear about what you want than in health care. If you allow yourself or your animal to just blindly take what ever a doctor recommends, trouble will ensue. I guarantee it. This episode was inspired by a listener who knew she didn’t want vaccines for her pup. She’d already seen vaccine damage in her two children, but when she sought out holistic vets, she asked them if they vaccinated. They did. And Alesha felt stu...

Could YOU start a titer clinic?

June 02, 2021 06:00 - 32 minutes - 22.4 MB

#034 Titer clinic: Lisa Rosamino is ready to start one now that COVID-19 pressures are letting up for her pet food buying club. She learned about titers from Dr. John Robb and me but wanted to make it easier for her many pet food customers to get that testing done easily and affordably. If your local vet has either refused to do titer testing or made them prohibitively expensive, you’ve got options. Recent reports from listeners that some vets are even refusing to draw blood for you to get...

Skin! It's alive!

May 25, 2021 06:00 - 1 hour - 41.4 MB

#033 The skin. Who knew your Sadie’s outer protective layer was intimately associated with her immune system? And when you shampoo her lovely skin, you are actually impairing Sadie’s immune system? Oh oh. We live in a world of “germophobia” (fear of germs), but the bottom line is, we all benefit from having healthy skin microbiomes! All those alcohol wipes and repeated washings with soap or shampoo do is mess up Mom Nature’s well-tested plans to keep us all healthy! Join me and homeopath...

Why Wondercide has 1 M Customers

May 18, 2021 06:00 - 1 hour - 41.5 MB

#032 I first heard of Wondercide when CEO Stephanie Boone sat with me in my Austin clinic over a decade ago and explained her amazing cedar oil based products to me. Using cedar, a ubiquitous “pest species” tree all over Texas that was being cleared and burned regularly to repel and kill fleas and ticks? It sounded like a win win. Tune in to hear how the poisoning of her own dog Luna started Stephanie’s drive to bring a better form of pest control to the world of dogs and cats and their pe...

Talking Poop with Dr. Odette Suter

May 11, 2021 06:00 - 43 minutes - 30 MB

#031 The more we learn about the microbiome, that vast collection of bacteria, yeast, viruses (and even small parasites) that make up our gut and that of our animals, the more important we see it is. It affects our brains and behavior. It affects our hormones. It affects immunity, digestion and nutrition, and probably a whole lot more. I invited Dr. Odette Suter, a holistic vet colleague who’s been doing FMT (poop “transplants” or fecal microbiota transplants) in many of her patients to goo...

Dr. Robb: Vaccine dose MATTERS

May 04, 2021 06:00 - 37 minutes - 25.9 MB

#030 We were taught in vet school that “one size fits all” when it comes to vaccination: a Great Dane and a Chihuahua both get a 1 cc dose of the vaccine. There was some vague explanation that the “antigenic load” was all the mattered, and big animals and small ones needed the same amount of challenging substance injected. This is what a past client was told recently when he asked for a smaller dose of rabies vaccine to be given to his 9 lb dog. His reaction (like mine should have been as a...

When Prevention CAUSES Disease

April 13, 2021 06:00 - 16 minutes - 11.7 MB

#029 Are you unknowingly causing illness in your animals in the name of prevention? This week’s episode was inspired by Sarah, who commented that her young Golden Doodle had just gotten sick for the second month in a row and she’s now wondering if she unwittingly caused the bloody diarrhea and vomiting by giving her pup heartworm prevention. Join me for an enlightening discussion on not only heartworm but prevention in general. Could your good intentions be paving the road to a hellish st...

Are You Making this Common Mistake?

April 06, 2021 06:00 - 17 minutes - 11.8 MB

#028 Some things are time sensitive, but biology rarely follows the calendar, especially when we speak of immunity in you or your animals. Does immunity slowly “empty out,” like a gas tank, and need “refilling” at a year or three? Listen in as I give you the info you need to see through the marketing that is often masked as “Your pet is DUE for xyz vaccines! Make your appointment today!” Inspired, as is much of my world, by questions I get from you, my listeners. Maggie is a 14 year old d...

CBD: Wide potential to help all

March 02, 2021 02:00 - 50 minutes - 34.6 MB

#027 My guest is Zac Pilossoph, DVM, who’s wearing several hats these days but I asked him on to share his knowledge about cannabis and its application in pet health. His curiosity about this plant has lead him to take advantage of repeated educational opportunities so that he can help champion its use for your animals. What are cannabinoids, the compounds we are hearing so much about that are present in this plant? And why does every animal with a spine, us included, have a widely distri...

Leaky gut: what, why, and how to fix it

February 23, 2021 07:00 - 1 hour - 49.3 MB

#026 My guest this week is Julie Anne Lee, homeopath and owner of the Adored Beast Apothecary. Her origin story itself is seriously inspiring. Julie felt the connection to animals from a very young age, and wanted to help them. After some years of searching, she realized her vet tech work wasn’t her best foot forward. When homeopathy cured her of a difficult illness quickly (and in a foreign country, to boot), she knew immediately that was what she wanted to offer the animal world. But, sh...

Susan Thixton: Your pet food advocate

February 16, 2021 07:00 - 42 minutes - 29.2 MB

#025 My guest this week is your best friend if you buy commercial pet food of any kind. Susan Thixton came to her calling as crusader for quality pet food many years ago when her vet told her her healthy dog died of bone cancer from a commonly used pet food preservative. She’s learned so much since then and shares it regularly with interested consumers with pets to feed via her website and newsletter. And believe me when I tell you, the world of Big Pet Food is “buyer beware!” Her work has...

Symptoms: Wildly misunderstood by your vet

February 09, 2021 07:00 - 23 minutes - 16.4 MB

#024 Most vets and “single species doctors” grossly misunderstand what symptoms are, how they are extremely valuable, and how cure is defined. That means that, unless you are smarter than your vet and choose carefully who gets to be your trusted health care provider, your animals are likely to become less and less healthy the longer they partake in “modern medicine.” Listen along with Dr. Falconer as he explains why symptoms are critically important to understand and hugely useful in gettin...

Your cats -- Actually canaries?

February 02, 2021 07:00 - 47 minutes - 33 MB

#023 I interviewed Dr. Andrea Tasi to learn more about how cats have been “talking” to all of us over the years. We explored how this amazing semi-wild species is perhaps the most sensitive one we see regularly, whether you are a veterinarian or not. Dr. Tasi has made a similar metaphor as I: Cats are humanity’s “canary in the coal mine.” I’ve written about them in this context over many years. The more they take part in conventional medicine, often in the name of prevention, the sicker t...

Don Hamilton, DVM - Do nosodes really work?

January 26, 2021 06:00 - 43 minutes - 30.3 MB

#022 What are nosodes and do they deserve the bad rap some vets give them? I asked my old friend and homeopathic vet colleague Dr. Don Hamilton to answer this in light of a Jean Dodds blog post saying they clearly don’t work. Not enough “science,” she said. Don helps us understand where that opinion comes from: a faulty study done by Susan Wynn and Ron Schultz Ph.D. Don was actually contacted before the trial was set up and he made it clear: the study design was guaranteed to fail. Their kn...

Lyme Disease: Why treatment is 100% unnecessary

January 19, 2021 06:00 - 33 minutes - 23 MB

#021 Lyme is a strange disease, and I invited Dr. Todd Cooney to weigh in on it as he’s researched it carefully and, like me, has seen dogs with positive titers who are completely healthy and free of symptoms. All too often, conventional veterinarians recommend a month’s worth of antibiotic treatment for these titer positive yet healthy dogs. Is that more risk than benefit, knowing what we know now about the importance of the microbiome to health? How about the Lyme vaccine? Should you get...

Lyme Disease: Why treatment is often 100% unnecessary

January 19, 2021 06:00 - 33 minutes - 23 MB

#021 Lyme is a strange disease, and I invited Dr. Todd Cooney to weigh in on it as he’s researched it carefully and, like me, has seen dogs with positive titers who are completely healthy and free of symptoms. All too often, conventional veterinarians recommend a month’s worth of antibiotic treatment for these titer positive yet healthy dogs. Is that more risk than benefit, knowing what we know now about the importance of the microbiome to health? How about the Lyme vaccine? Should you get...

Taking homeopathic practice out of the black box

January 11, 2021 16:00 - 28 minutes - 19.5 MB

#020 Have you ever considered using homeopathy to help your animals? Or, does it just seem too unbelievable or weird or just, well, unclear what it is exactly? And what does it look like if you embark on hiring a homeopathic vet to help you? This episode answers those questions for you, so you can better understand what homeopathy is (and isn’t) know what to expect from a homeopathic vet visit have an answer to the skeptics who say it’s “only a placebo!” see how very important you are ...

Dealing With Vet Hazing

January 05, 2021 06:00 - 21 minutes - 14.7 MB

#019 This week’s episode is in response to a plea from a dog owner on Facebook. She was finding the vets around her intent on selling her “drugs” (read: pesticides) and vaccines when she didn’t want either. She called it “literally PUSHING” her to get these unwanted treatments. While she’s been avoiding them for a few years as her dog has been doing well since a switch to a raw food diet three years ago, she still would like to avail herself of veterinary services from time to time: Worm ...

Dealing With Vet Hazing

January 05, 2021 06:00 - 21 minutes - 14.7 MB

#019 This week’s episode is in response to a plea from a dog owner on Facebook. She was finding the vets around her intent on selling her “drugs” (read: pesticides) and vaccines when she didn’t want either. She called it “literally PUSHING” her to get these unwanted treatments. While she’s been avoiding them for a few years as her dog has been doing well since a switch to a raw food diet three years ago, she still would like to avail herself of veterinary services from time to time: Worm ...

Colostrum vs Transfer Factor: What's Wiser?

December 29, 2020 06:00 - 20 minutes - 14.1 MB

#018: Have you sought to strengthen your animal’s immune system and been told colostrum is an amazing natural way to do that? How it’s specially made to help calves survive in the germ filled world they are born into, and so, it’s good for you and your animals? I’ve long been impressed with a component of colostrum called transfer factor. It’s well studied for over 60 years with thousands of research papers published on it world wide. I chose to use it in myself and my patients based largel...

Is vegan food right for your dog or cat?

December 22, 2020 06:00 - 39 minutes - 27.1 MB

#017 Dr. Marybeth Minter shares a case with us, a dog I’ve heard about over the years, long suffering with horrible allergic skin disease. Kali, the middle aged Border Collie had lost all her coat, had open sores, was regularly plagued with fleas, and Chrystal, her owner had tried everything without success. Kali was on various raw food diets, healthy supplements, and had been prescribed for by two other well qualified homeopathic vets in the past without much improvement. When Dr. Minter w...

Titers: Are you using them wisely?

December 15, 2020 06:00 - 1 hour - 42 MB

#016 In this interview, I’m the guest and I’m being interviewed on homeopath Julie Anne Lee’s Adored Beast show. Tune in to learn how you can use titers wisely and save both money and your pet’s health when you know this stuff. Titers seem simple enough on the surface: they are measures of antibodies your animal has made to a germ of some sort, usually a virus. But what are the limits of titer testing? Does your vet read titers properly? Do breeders understand the difference between vac...

Lions and long distance homeopathy

December 08, 2020 06:00 - 42 minutes - 29 MB

#015 Eleni Gkikakis is an animal intuitive but joined me on this interview as a homeopath. Not just any homeopath, Eleni has found herself working with a species most of us have only seen in zoos or on TV: the African lion. If you weren’t aware, homeopathy can be used via telephone consultation to help animals at any distance. As it requires symptoms to guide the prescriber to the right remedies, those can be conveyed in a variety of ways, and in Eleni’s case, that’s been via phone and inte...

When Fear Rules, Everyone Loses

December 01, 2020 06:00 - 24 minutes - 16.7 MB

#014 Fear seems an all too common emotion among many animal owners these days, especially with the near constant narrative coming at us about some supposedly killer virus out there, just waiting to bring us down. I’d like to see fear replaced with reason and confidence, especially when it comes to raising wildly healthy, naturally disease-resistant Vital Animals. Join me as I take you through the real life scenarios that brought this emotion to my attention recently and see how I think it’...

Kasie Maxwell: How to make the jump to raw

November 24, 2020 06:00 - 59 minutes - 41.2 MB

#013 Kasie Maxwell is back, this time sharing her decades of experience in helping pet owners make the transition to raw feeding. We discuss kittens, puppies, kibble addicted cats, and dogs and how each is unique in their needs to make the jump smooth. Not only has Kasie worked through her SFRAW buying club to help people climb to a higher nutritional plane for their pets, she also shares how a walkabout in Kenya helped shape her recommendations on feeding your cats. She was lucky enough to...

Dr. Madalyn Ward: Horses -- feeding their needs, vaccine concerns

November 17, 2020 06:00 - 34 minutes - 23.8 MB

#012 Dr. Madalyn Ward has been working with horses since well before vet school and joined a conventional equine practice early on. We both graduated in 1980 and our paths crossed first in 1992 when we both joined the first Professional Course in Veterinary Homeopathy, taught for graduate veterinarians by Dr. Richard Pitcairn, in Eugene, OR. She traveled from Austin and I from Maui repeatedly for a year’s study (5 or 6 trips as I recall). After that training, her practice changed fundament...

Breeders: Please STOP Doing This!

November 10, 2020 06:00 - 19 minutes - 13.4 MB

#011 As a blog writer and podcaster, I get a lot of email, especially when things have gone badly in an animal’s world. One recurring theme that has always rubbed me the wrong way is the reports that puppies were vaccinated, often more than once, before they were sent home. As most leave for their new homes at 8 weeks of age, that translates to vaccines given to pups of 4 weeks or 6 weeks of age, and maybe again at 8 weeks, before they travel! As there is plenty of science behind this bein...

Dr. Pitcairn: would you inject a disease?

November 03, 2020 06:00 - 54 minutes - 37.8 MB

#010 Have you ever thought of giving a vaccine as giving a disease? Dr. Pitcairn talks us through the logic and how we’ve been tricked into thinking that we are only helping our animals when we give a vaccine. This helped Dr. Pitcairn discover the significance of vaccination in trying to cure his chronically ill patients many years ago. When they got well only to a point, he began to wonder if “vaccinosis” was at work (the illness that comes after a vaccine). Does “giving the disease” by i...

Thomas Sandberg: Laughing at life expectancy statistics

October 27, 2020 04:00 - 1 hour - 48.2 MB

#009 Thomas Sandberg is an Animal Naturopath who’s seen first hand the power of feeding a “carnivore model” diet. His own Great Danes on this diet doubled their expected lifespans and he knew he was on to something. That early “Ah Ha” has grown into a much larger study now and his aim is to enlist 20,000 dogs and 5000 cats who are being fed raw to see how far the boundaries can be pushed. Some key ideas from this interview: Forget everything you’ve heard about balance and bacteria, the tw...

Dr. Andrea Tasi: 100% Cats, 100% Homeopathy

October 20, 2020 05:00 - 38 minutes - 26.6 MB

#008 It’s not often you find a vet like Dr. Andrea Tasi, who knew even before vet school that she’d do an all-feline practice. What makes her unique, though, is that she shifted her practice to fully homeopathic and that changed everything. Join us as Dr. Tasi speaks to the uniqueness of this species, the challenges they face in “domestication” (Ha! Let’s use that word loosely), being both a predator and prey simultaneously, the challenges of homeopathy, and how to interpret litter box troub...

Dr. Scott Treadway on formulating and detox

October 13, 2020 04:00 - 30 minutes - 21.1 MB

#007 Dr. Scott Treadway has one over arching philosophy when it comes to formulating supplements: they will be most useful when they are wholly made from natural ingredients. Scott is a friend and partner in our Vital Animal Health sister company that makes our supplement line. I invited him on this week to talk about our latest supplement, Vital Animal Detox. We discuss the need for detox supplementation in pets and Scott goes into detail on why his formulation, based on highly purified z...

How one cat's death sentence changed Kasie Maxwell's life

October 06, 2020 04:00 - 1 hour - 41.4 MB

#006 It all started with a 9 year old cat given a death sentence: 3 months to live. Today’s guest spent an entire night studying, realizing she’d been doing it all wrong, and changed her cat’s diet over the next year with what she learned. Her cat recovered and was never sick again, dying at the respectable age of 22. Raw food for pets got its well deserved introduction to San Francisco in a big way when Kasie Maxwell Grujcic got a bunch of people to make an “assembly line” in a friend’s ga...

Why homeopathic vets need to kill this joke

September 30, 2020 02:00 - 16 minutes - 11.4 MB

#005 First, a dead serious discussion of why an oft-told joke among homeopathic vet colleagues needs to die. The longer this joke is true, the more animals suffer and the more money is bled from well meaning pet owners. None of that is funny! The “disease of our day” and why Dr. Falconer now almost never takes new patients these days. Modern medicine’s “dirty little secret” and just how are you supposed to find a solid homeopathic vet when there are so many “fauxistic” vets out there? Be ...

Dr. John Robb

September 22, 2020 04:00 - 34 minutes - 23.6 MB

#004 Dr. John Robb joins me and shares a lot of helpful knowledge on titers in pets. He’d like to see titers accepted widely by all licensing authorities as a means of preventing over-vaccination. Listen in as Dr. Robb shares these gems with us: 02:34 “The titer tells us the pet has already achieved immunity. So there’s no benefit from the vaccine…you’re injecting something that can only harm, with no benefit. That’s malpractice, in my opinion.” 04:34: “I don’t really agree with the numbe...

Dr. John Robb Titers and Immune Certificates

September 22, 2020 04:00 - 34 minutes - 23.6 MB

#004 Dr. John Robb joins me and shares a lot of helpful knowledge on titers in pets. He’d like to see titers accepted widely by all licensing authorities as a means of preventing over-vaccination. Listen in as Dr. Robb shares these gems with us: 02:34 “The titer tells us the pet has already achieved immunity. So there’s no benefit from the vaccine…you’re injecting something that can only harm, with no benefit. That’s malpractice, in my opinion.” 04:34: “I don’t really agree with the numbe...

Dr. Todd Cooney: Parvo - Better, safer prevention + treatments

September 03, 2020 04:00 - 40 minutes - 28 MB

#003 Dr. Todd Cooney has had remarkable success with parvo. He's actually wiped it out of his practice after decades of struggling with it. His past conventional prevention failed 40% of the time and his clinic greeted him every morning with the stench unique to this deadly disease. What changed? And why is his patient population now seeing zero parvo incidence? It's all because Dr. Cooney shifted his prevention to homeoprophylaxis, the use of nosodes instead of the old school injections w...

Dr. Richard Pitcairn: A virologist looks at viruses and immunity

August 31, 2020 10:00 - 1 hour - 41.7 MB

#002 You probably know Dr. Pitcairn as the author of Dr. Pitcairn's Complete Guide to Natural Health for Dogs and Cats. It was this book that helped me offer something natural to my new clients as I transitioned to a holistic practice in the early 90's. Raw, balanced diets made a huge difference in my patients, and this book had the recipes to make the food. Then, he took on a new role in 1992 for me, when he taught the first Professional Course in Veterinary Homeopathy. That was a serious ...

Welcome to Vital Animal Podcast!

August 30, 2020 05:00 - 15 minutes - 10.7 MB

#001 - The Vital Animal podcast is here to help YOU make YOUR animals wildly healthy, naturally disease-resistant, and truly, wholly VITAL! Homeopathic veterinarian Dr. Will Falconer shares his wealth of knowledge from 4 decades in practice on all manner of ways you can make your animals the healthiest they can be. You can learn more about this approach at his long standing resource-filled website, Vital Animal: https://VitalAnimal.com In this first episode, Dr. Falconer shares his fou...

Vital Animal Podcast

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