Category Archives: Veterinary Medicine

Give a dog a bone, and some germs and bugs too!

Leave a reply

NSCI0154

van Bree, F.O.J, Bokken, G.C.A.M., Mineur, R., Franssen, F., Opsteegh, M., van der Giessen, J.W.B., Lipman, L.J.A. and Paul A M Overgaauw, P.A.M. (2017) ‘Zoonotic bacteria and parasites found in raw meat-based diets for cats and dogs’, Veterinary Record, vol. 182, p. 50, (DOI: 10.1136/vr.104535).
[full reference and links]

Yet another paper has just been published confirming the less than startling fact that raw diets for dogs contain what we professionals call ‘germs and bugs‘. A team of Dutch researchers looked at thirty five samples from eight commercially available brands of raw meat based diets (RMBD) and discovered bacteria such as E. coli, Listeria, and Salmonella, as well as parasites including Sarcocysts and Toxoplasma gondii in them. A staggering 80 per cent of the samples contained antibiotic resistant E. coli bacteria. This seething collection of flora and fauna can cause illness in humans ranging from gastro-enteritis through haemorrhagic colitis and kidney-failure, to death in new-born babies and abortion in pregnant women. The organisms can transfer from dog to dog as well as to owners either directly from the raw-fed dog or indirectly by the contamination of the surfaces and utensils used to prepare the raw-food; they will multiply at room temperatures in food bowls. In many cases dogs can carry these micro-organisms, all the time shedding them into the environment, without showing any signs of ill health themselves. Furthermore such diets have been reported to cause problems in the dogs who eat them such as damaged teeth, perforated guts, hyperthyroidism and nutritional imbalance.

The study concludes, in that typically dispassionate way that published papers do, that owners should be made aware of the risks of feeding raw food to pets. RationalVetMed would venture a step further – just don’t! There is no good reason to feed raw food to your pets and there are serious risks to you, your family and your pets if you do. If, despite the risks, you insist on feeding raw then that is up to you but don’t kid yourself it has anything to do with supposed health benefits, because there are none, your decision is purely and simply a lifestyle choice.

See RationalVetMed.org for the full reference and links.

Homeopathy, science and whale omlettes

1 Reply

MAML345

‘Well‘, said the homeopath, drawing breath during a particularly bruising facebook debate, ‘science doesn’t know everything. Those conventional medicines, they always do more harm than good and hardly any have been tested by your so-called Gold Standard, the double blind placebo controlled trial (DBPCT). Just the other day I heard that Cartrophen took down a bunch of Labradors!‘

Apart from this typically egregious example of the kind of emotive, vague and unsubstantiated ‘evidence’ homeopaths favour, the point is science doesn’t begin and end with the DBPCT. Science is a system, a method which at its most basic is just a way of asking questions and investigating claims. Science actually comes down to one particular question: ‘Prove it!’. So in the unlikely event that Carprophen [a useful, safe and popular painkiller for dogs] did ‘take down a bunch of Labradors‘ that should, and would have been investigated through the official suspected adverse reaction surveillance scheme (SARSS) and steps taken, as actually happened in cases like Thalidomide in human medicine or the use of avermectins in certain collie dogs or any one of a number of other cases. It’s easy to do, you can report drug reactions online at the click of a button from a whole load of different official government websites or you can phone the drug company direct and they’ll do it for you or, if you’re old fashioned like me, you can fill out a garish yellow Veterinary Medicines Directorate SARSS forms using your favourite fountain pen and pop it in the post – I’ve got a pile of them on my desk and use them or their online equivalents regularly.

This is science in progress – a self-correcting system working to put itself (and medicine) in order. When did you last hear of anyone using vitamin E to treat heart disease? Yet this was a very popular treatment in the middle of the last century, used by intelligent, highly trained veterinary surgeons who, like homeopaths, swore it gave good results ‘in their cases’. It’s the same with the treatments of heroic medicine – no one practices purging, firing or bleeding now, the thought of doing so would horrify any contemporary veterinary surgeon. Yet they were the go-to treatments of their day and anyone who didn’t believe in them at the time would have been regarded as being thicker than a whale omlette.

The reason these long-discredited treatments are no longer mainstream as they once were is that science-based (rational) practitioners were, unlike homeopaths, able to recognise and accept a treatment practitioners had been using for generations was doing more harm than good and were willing to change based on scientific evidence rather than just personal experience. The problem with homeopaths is they don’t change, their methods of treatment are based entirely on personal experience. When presented with actual science – evidence homeopathy is ineffective – all we hear are increasingly implausible excuses about why it really does work, despite all appearences, and how critics are always wrong. Homeopaths’ starting point is first and foremost that homeopathy works, after that any evidence which comes their way is cherry-picked, filtered or dismissed to support that core belief, not to test it as should be the case. And that ain’t science, and it ain’t right!

And the daft thing is, after all that, even if proper drugs were utter rubbish, even if they did all the dreadful things homeopaths pretend they do, it STILL wouldn’t mean that homeopathy works!

Homeopaths – poor losers

Bodey, A.L., Almond, C.J. and Holmes, M.A. (2017) ‘Double-blinded randomised placebo-controlled clinical trial of individualised homeopathic treatment of hyperthyroid cats’, Veterinary Record, vol 180, p. 377 (doi:10.1136/vr.104007). [Visit RationalVetMed.org for full links]

‘Abstract… There were no statistically significant differences in the changes seen between the two treatment arms following placebo or homeopathic treatment… or between the means of each parameter for either treatment arm before and after placebo or homeopathic treatment…  The results of this study failed to provide any evidence of the efficacy of homeopathic treatment of feline hyperthyroidism.’

§

Hyperthyroidism (an over-active thyroid gland) in cats is a nasty, insidious disease which, in a nutshell, turns the metabolism of affected cats up to eleven. Their heart starts to beat so fast it eventually fails, their energy consumption rockets so they develop a ravenous appetite, eating more food than ever before, yet they still lose weight. And they also get quite grumpy as a rule. But despite all this they can live untreated for a considerable while, although with serious quality of life issues.

Some homeopaths claim you can treat an overactive thyroid by using homeopathy or, more precisely, isopathy with nosodes prepared from ground up thyroid glands (which, by the way, is an example of ‘sympathetic magic’, along the lines of the medicine man spitting on the ground to bring rain or a voodoo priest sticking pins in an effigy of someone who is ill). These homeopaths are most charitably described as ‘mistaken’.

What happens when truly hyperthyroid cats are treated homeopathically (i.e. with nothing) is that they stuggle on for months and months with heart failure and weight loss, becoming increasingly uncomfortable and breathless yet all the time, like most cats, just appearing to sit around quietly rather than making a fuss, right up until the point they go into acute heart failure and die, often in some distress. And while this is happening the attending homeopath is either claiming success on the good days or claiming an ‘aggravation’ during the bad ones – ‘ever had your cat vaccinated, ever fed it commercially prepared cat food, ever given it any medicine, or flea or worm treatment? There you are then, it’s all your fault, it’s the toxins’, they’ll tell you as they trouser your hard-earned cash.

And it’s all nonsense – you cannot successfully treat an overactive thyroid with homeopathy or isopathy as this well conducted trial by statistical supremo Mark Holmes and crew shows.

Of course, the homeopaths are wingeing about it, as they always do when trials, no matter how well conducted, don’t give results they like, even when in this case homeopathic head honcho John Saxton personally gave his go ahead for the trial design.

The homeopathic practitioner, Chris Almond, who participated in the trial says he is expecting a hard time from his homeopathic colleagues – ‘I don’t think I am going to be very popular’ he complains in an article in the BSAVA Companion magazine. And then, in typical homeopathic fashion, the excuses start – having been a willing part of the trial for the whole six years it took to perform, cooperating at every stage and interpreting the answers from owners in response to an agreed questionnaire, once the results are published he suddenly changes his tune, ‘the quality of responses from clients in the questionnaire was often “pretty poor” and made it difficult for him to determine the best individualized treatment for each animal’. Furthermore, he has now decided ‘he was also uncomfortable with the three-week duration of therapy set in the trial protocol’ and, anyway (one can almost hear the stamping of tiny feet and the sound of toys being thrown out of prams by this stage), ‘the experience of participating in the study has shown him that the randomized controlled trial format is simply not suitable as a test of homeopathic methods’.

Well why didn’t he say something sooner, one might well ask? Could it be he was waiting just in case the results were favourable to homeopathy first, in which case the triumphalist cries from the vet homs would have been deafening? But that didn’t happen, the results were entirely in line with expectations and it looks like Mr Almond is currently being hung out to dry by his erstwhile colleagues for consorting with the devil and participating in a well run, methodologically robust trial along with two other veterinary surgeons who were completely independent of any vested interest. Really, what was he thinking!

I can do no better than to quote Andrew Bodey, the (conventional) veterinary practitioner whose idea it was to perform the trial in the first place, ‘If the purpose of your efforts is to justify your own opinions rather than to answer a legitimate question, then that is not going to work…‘

There’s no getting away from it, homeopaths are simply poor losers.

For full links to the original papers visit RationalVetMed.org.