Intro 0:00
Welcome to the Naturally Healthy Pets podcast. Let's get to it.
Dr. Judy Morgan 0:04
Welcome to the Naturally Healthy Pets podcast. I'm your host, Dr. Judy Morgan. And my guest today is Poppy Phillips. And we have an incredible topic today. And the title is every dog's eyes tell a story. And it's not what you think. And actually, I think we should replace dogs with animals being I think we could use this for anything. So you will never look at your dog or pet, horse whatever the same after hearing from board certified animal naturopath, Poppy Phillips, my guest today. She is going to be speaking about animal Iridology. The eyes are not only windows to the soul. Iridology, the study of the iris offers insights to your pets wellness, and I've heard of this, but I've never used it. So learning about the basics of iridology can empower pet guardians to know if our companions are needing some extra care in certain areas of their bodies. Stress levels, help assess if the current nutritional protocol is working effectively, and help track diagnose diseases. And she actually has an intro course on this and we'll talk about that later on. But first of all, thank you for being my guest today Poppy. I really appreciate it.
Poppy Phillips
Thank you for having me, Dr. Judy, I'm excited. And I caught your Chinese medicine, IRIS reading out on your live one day and I was like, look at that! That's so exciting.
Dr. Judy Morgan 1:37
Yeah. So the iris is the colored part of the eye. So can you give us a little more history and how you got into this? You know? Why? Why this?
Poppy Phillips
I know, really, right. I thought it was a joke. And so I was going to Kingdom College of Natural Health, they have an animal naturopathic track and was studying animal homeopathy. And this came up as a short course, weekend course. And I thought it was a joke. I thought it was super woo woo. And I was like, That is ridiculous. But I didn't know any animal iridologist and I'm, I was originally an equine body worker. And I thought well, no equine body workers do animal iridology so I guess, you know, pay the money and do the course and see how it plays out. I thought it was a little gimmicky. Working in LA and stuff, maybe those new agers would really really love this.
Poppy Phillips 2:42
And so halfway through the course. And it was only like a two day course. I was blown away. I was like, why aren't people doing this, like this is legit. And we've created a group now of veterinarians and pet professionals that are advancing iridology the science of animal iridology. And so we actually have partnered with a company that does equine dissections, we're taking Iris photos, and then dissecting the horse and, and we'll probably rewrite the animal eye grid on that. So I'm looking for somebody doing the dogs and cats. So if you know anybody that's doing active dissections, I would love to partner with them.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Very cool. Yeah, I don't know. I mean, other than the vet schools for anatomy class and that sort of thing. So but that's, that's pretty cool.
Dr. Judy Morgan 3:35
So in the notes, it says animal EirGrid ology enables the constitution of an animal to be assessed. What's that mean?
Poppy Phillips
So the way I look at it is a lot of pet owners don't actually know what's going on in their animals. And so when they submit eyes, you can tell this pet's super stressed out. Somebody, I had like an online challenge where we all like walk through animal iridology for a dog course. And people submitted eyes and there was this one dog with like this very fibrous looking eye. And it turned out the dog was on Prozac. And so you can tell how stressed out
Poppy Phillips 4:19
just itchy skin, erratic behavior, things like that from just reading the iris so it's a very insightful tool. And the cool thing is the advancement of cell phones have brought Iridology into the home so it used to be Oh, yeah, yeah. So it used to be originally hand drawn like Howard Carter found Iris silver plates of irises in Tutankhamun's tomb. And so it dates probably back to 5000 BC.
Poppy Phillips 4:55
But they used to be hand drawn, then you know, somebody with a lot of equipment photography equipment would either come to your house, or you would bring your animal to an animal iridologist. Which how many of those were there? Not very many. But now that we have cell phones, it is a pet friendly thing that you can do from the comfort of your own home. So it's really cool.
Dr. Judy Morgan
That is very cool. So does the eye color itself. Like if you have a blue eye versus Hazel eye versus a brown eye? Does that have? Like does that mean anything about a pet's personality or is is a changes in the iris that we're looking for?
Poppy Phillips
It's so in human iridology, it does mean different constitutions regarding eye color. In animals, we have not dialed it down to that specific. So that's why we have this group of like
Poppy Phillips 5:55
pet parent researchers, I guess you would call them. And so yeah, you can say maybe Australian shepherds or huskies and all those animals with maybe a bluer eye might be a little more over the top.
Poppy Phillips 6:09
Just saying but I haven't made this way to put it. But I haven't like, grafted a correlation between blue eyes and brown eyes. And And the weird thing is dogs don't have that much diversity in colors whereas cats have a lot of diversity. Cats might have like yellow eyes, or green eyes or blue eyes. And so there's a lot we still need to learn about this. Yeah, so we're looking for, for fiber, texture, color patterns, more than, like, eye color. And then also the parenting like in the human iridology. Like the mom, your genetic, genetic mother marks on one eye and your genetic father marks on the other eye. We haven't seen that with dogs. But I think because they're born in litters. So I'm not sure about that. And, and pre and post vaccines are very different eyes like I have.
Poppy Phillips 7:08
I have not seen many pre vaccine eyes on puppies, because they don't open their eyes till they're two years old. I mean, two months old, or two weeks, oh my gosh. And so most of the puppy eyes are submitted to me after vaccines, and they look horrible. The irises look like old dogs. And so it's hard to tell on the parenting. So if you're gonna use it for genetic factors, it's probably best to look at the dam, or the bitch and the stud. And and see if you want to breed to that for congenital issues.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Really? That is quite interesting. So if we, for instance, had a pair of dogs that we wanted to put together by looking at their Iris, we might be able to say that wouldn't be a good match?
Poppy Phillips
Possibly. I'm encouraging you to help me with that.
Dr. Judy Morgan
So I've done a breeder, so I don't, I don't want to breeding animals.
Poppy Phillips
So any of you breeders out there. I want you to help us on this.
Dr. Judy Morgan 8:17
This is very cool. So so if somebody started studying human iridology, does that translate over? Are we using those basic principles for our animals?
Poppy Phillips
So the eye grid is not exactly the same. The work of Bernard Jensen, who's pretty much the father of USA Iridology. He has extensive eye grids. Mercedes, who I learned from Mercedes Colburn studied under Bernard Jensen. And so you can probably use one of his human maps, but the front legs and a little different area. And so there's certain things that might be a tiny bit different, but basically, you might be able to pull that and go, oh, there's a mark here and here. And we we mark it like a clock. So you go from 12 o'clock to three o'clock, six o'clock to nine o'clock. And and graph the iris like that.
Dr. Judy Morgan 9:14
And changes that you're seeing in certain areas correlate with certain areas of the body?
Poppy Phillips
Yes, absolutely. And, and it may not be in the exact quadrant, but you could see and start pointing your veterinarian in that direction. I had a case the other day
Poppy Phillips 9:33
where this woman's dog was down for two weeks. And she said, my membership, I go send me the eyes, and the gallbladder was highlighted. I'm like, it's gallbladder and thyroid. I was like, also the thyroid. She's like, well, he's on thyroid meds. So I'm like, okay, there you go, have your thyroid recheck and look at the gallbladder and we did some stuff before she could get to the vet because there's sometimes a couple of weeks if it's not an emergency that you're waiting? And so this is another asset to iridology is if you can't get into your vet, you can look in the iris and go, Oh, look, this area's congested. And so we started implementing a gallbladder cleanse on this dog, she finally got to the vet, they confirmed that it was gallbladder and the dog was already feeling better. And the vet was like, keep doing what you're doing. It's working.
Dr. Judy Morgan 10:27
Well, there you go. What other kinds of things like can we tell about? like heart disease or arthritis? I mean, kidney disease. What other things can we tell?
Poppy Phillips
So so a lot of people are like, well, I already knew that about my dog, but But it seemed visible stuff that we want to look at, like chronic pancreatitis, and liver congestion. So you want to make sure your detox pathways are clean and functioning. So if those detox pathways are getting congested, you'll see it in the iris. And then you can apply whatever you need to apply to open up those detox pathways to prevent a major major crisis. So you can be proactive you can also see if your protocol's working. If your GI tract is working. The beautiful thing about iridology is they've been preaching digestive, GI tract, pet health for years or human health in the GI tract. So there's distinctive GI tract markers, you can see if it's toxic, or if it's stressed by the darkness or the size of it. And so iridologists were ahead of the game on GI tract health, gut health as well, right. So they have been preaching that for years. And now science has finally caught up to it. But it's super fun. And we're also seeing in horses, specifically neurologic disorders prior to the body manifestation. So we're seeing distinctive Iris marks, we can alert the owner. A lot of times owners are like, Oh, they're not neurologic, they're not doing this. They're not doing that. And I'm like, let's just start implementing some stuff and they're like, Wow, my animal's so much better or I'll suggest, go to the vet suggest bloodwork the vets are never really happy with that.
Poppy Phillips 12:20
There's no physical signs or very, very low physical signs like the horse is nonproductive or maybe lame intermittently or something like that. And we're actually ahead we're, we're finding things on such low symptoms that the vets are like, Oh, I wouldn't ever check for that. But it's helping highlight.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Yeah, now I'm wishing I had this when I was in practice, we need to take a break to hear from our sponsors. We'll be back in just a couple of minutes. This is fascinating.
PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT 12:50
Ready to prepare meals for your dog at home with confidence? Why not learn from the best? Dr. Judy's course homemade food for dogs 101 is designed to help you feel comfortable making safe and balanced meals for your dog using fresh whole food ingredients. Understand your dog's nutritional requirements and take the guesswork out of home prepared food. As a thank you to podcast listeners Use Discount Code PODCAST22 for 15% off Dr. Judy's course, Homemade Food For Dogs 101 at checkout at Dr. Judy u.com.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Welcome back to the Naturally Healthy Pets podcast. My guest today is Poppy Phillips and we are discussing iridology which is fascinating. So it's basically studying the iris or the colored parts of the eye of our animals. And it can also be done for people to look at health issues that are going on. So you're saying with the horses, but right before the break that you can start seeing neurologic symptoms even before the animal really so we can kind of predict some of the future health issues that are going to be affecting them.
Poppy Phillips
Absolutely. So I work on a ton of EPM horses that has been kind of my passion. I had a horse years and years ago that had was diagnosed with EPM. And UC Davis asked me to euthanize him and I was like nope, I'm taking him home. They're like no you're not and I'm like yeah, I am and they're like what are you gonna do with him? I'm gonna fix him.
Poppy Phillips 14:27
So created a blend that fixed him. And then with this group that we have, and because I'm suddenly work on a lot of EPM horses, we just started taking tons of EPM eyes and so there's some consistency, I would say 90% of all Equine EPM eyes look have distinctive marks in it. I've seen only like five confirmed Lyme's eyes, but they're pretty consistent too.
Dr. Judy Morgan 15:00
So we we've had both of those diseases. In our horses and actually manage I, my daughter had wanted, my heart horse had had EPM as well, probably had Lyme along the way as well. But the EPM, we both used medication for a short period of time. But really the the major impacts were made by alternative therapies that we used to treat their gut and treat their inflammation, so can be a huge difference for those who don't know, EPM is equine protozoal myelitis. So it's a protozoal infection, which is a parasite in the nervous system. And in the spinal column, that kind of really stinks. Bad news stuff, but, you know, we had pretty successful outcomes with our guys. So and I really think that using natural therapies was what really made a difference for our guys. So do you need so when you're looking at the iris, are you like, do you have to be an ophthalmologist? You need ophthalmology equipment? Are you just looking with your eyes or magnifying glass? How are you looking at these?
Poppy Phillips
just your cell phone. So yeah, this cell phone often to take great eye photos, you can video, or you can photograph but you want additional light. Um, horses have these big, pretty glossy eyes, they're super easy to take pictures of they're the biggest eyes on mammals, of all animals, dogs and cats not so much. And the flash really annoys them. So you want to practice on other pets. You want to practice on people's pets but not your own that you want to document. So you get all your mishaps and bales behind you. Because once you start taking iris photos, your dog will probably be pretty annoyed with you. And every time you break out the camera, they'll be like maybe not. So you want to get good at it. And you want to zoom in you when you crop your photos, you want to make sure to leave the tear duct because you don't know which it is so you won't know the right I heard the left eye and the right eye controls the right side of the body. Left Eye controls the left side so we have to know which eye and there's distinctive marks in different in each eye like the heart marks on one eye and the spleen, marks on another eye. So you there's just some differences. So you have to like date it put your animals name on it, make sure the tear ducts are available clean your screen your lenses to get good eye quality and lots of lighting, but nothing in the background because she'll pick up like the trees and the barn door and things like that. So you need a blank space behind you.
Dr. Judy Morgan 17:48
Interesting, this is very cool. So we have in the notes that many patients have stress rings or cramp rings. What are those?
Poppy Phillips 18:00
So how do I say this easily. You'll notice like these ropey lines on high anxiety cats and dogs. horses Mark maybe a little different but on dogs and cats there will be like this deep the the more stressed out the ropier and more protruding it will look in the iris and so you can kind of tell if their nervous system in regards to emotional nervous system is jacked up. So there's different lines for the physical nervous system as well as mental emotional nervous system. So you have to discern which nervous system we're dealing with. But the emotional nervous system comes about 1/3 to middle of the eye.
Poppy Phillips 18:49
And it will mark kind of edgy ropey cats or little further out interesting cats are closer to the the actual physical nervous system and I see it a lot in cats, of course. Right?
Dr. Judy Morgan 19:05
Well studies show that 90% of indoor cats are highly stressed, so
Poppy Phillips
I didn't know that and that's so sad and I don't I don't blame them. I guess it's
Dr. Judy Morgan
Yeah, it is so not their natural environment and they don't get to hunt and pounce and stalk and you know, get their prey and climb trees and fall out of trees and do all the things that cats do
Dr. Judy Morgan 19:29
my outdoor cats are they chase grasshoppers and just snag them out of the air and pounce on them. I mean there's so my indoor cats do not get to do that.
Dr. Judy Morgan 19:42
So are there any things you can't do with iridology?
Poppy Phillips
That's a really good question. So you can't diagnose. You can only look at marks. So when my dog had that Meningioma I didn't know it was Meningioma marking until the surgery. And when we did the surgery, that Mark went away, or there was just a tiny blip. So hindsight, I could see they didn't get all of it.
Poppy Phillips 20:13
So you can actually detect the rate of disease and growth, like we did there.
Poppy Phillips 20:22
But pregnancy, you don't really see pregnancy in the eye. You can't tell the age in the eye. Not yet. I do think that. So in retina reading, now they do all these retinal scans, and they're seeing Alzheimer's and heart disease show up in retina readings. And I do feel like we'll be able to dial it down like that, but it's more of a insight type of thing. What else can't you tell? I think on gender, you cannot tell gender, the in the iris.
Dr. Judy Morgan 20:58
So, for instance, if a if you're adopting a pet, and you're like, Oh, I'm gonna have somebody look at the iris and tell me, you know, things that I might bump up against. When if they've had past problems, like let's say they've had a history of pancreatitis, but it was healed or not an issue now, will it show up that there was a past problem or once, like, if you have the surgery to remove the tumor, or whatever the problem is, or if you're using medications that are taking care of whatever the problem is, then do you do you see that history there? Is there like a telltale scarring? Or is it once it's healed? It's gone?
Poppy Phillips
I love this question. So if it has done some damage, if there is residual damage, you should see a mark. Now, it might be a really, really faint mark, or it might be degenerative tissue, which might be a black mark on the eyes. So it might be a very deep scarring. So if you see deep dark marks, you may want to run, you may want to weigh your odds on this and go am I am I up for the task of this. But if it's a fading mark, so marks that are fading are either coming or going and it's hard to tell which direction and that's where you have to have like a communication with whoever might be fostering the dog. Are you noticing this stuff? Have you ever seen anything like this? And if they say no, it's probably coming.
Dr. Judy Morgan 22:33
so, for instance, I adopted a cocker spaniel who had a well, he was a stray so nobody knew anything. But when I took him to the the ophthalmologist, we learned a lot because he came with cataracts in both eyes and he was blind. And when the ophthalmologist looked at him, he said, Okay, well, the one eye is completely blind because he has had glaucoma in his eyes at some point, which has now normalized, and the one eye is not going to be visual, no matter what we do the other one, we're going to take the cataract out, we should have some vision, which we got about, I don't know 1%.
Dr. Judy Morgan23:09
but because he's got that, like the eye, the cataract that we weren't able to remove, like the iris part of his eye is really narrow and shrunken down because everything's been fixated. Can you still read things in those or is that there's just too much scarring and damage?
Poppy Phillips
That's pretty tough.
Poppy Phillips 23:31
I have a dog with a neuro keto ketogenic KCS I'm saying that wrong. I know. But, um, so he does not mark so well and you can't see it very well. Oddly, I've done a SARDs dog and it had full marks, which I was blown away by because I assumed that there would be a blank slate. So sometimes, you might have these big beautiful eyes with no marks on them. And it can be really deceptive because they're on medication and those medications are blocking the pain receptors. So it's not marking on the iris but also you assume that blind dogs wouldn't mark but the SARDs dog did so on glaucoma. You know, I'm not an ophthalmologist, but we have caught eye diseases on film. Or just recently we did a mare who had like this white mark and I thought it was a glare. And then I came back to reshoot her she was positive EPM and they treated her so they were like can you reshoot that? And she had like an ulceration on her cornea. I was like well you need to get that looked at.
Poppy Phillips 24:39
So blind dogs might not dogs with cataracts, maybe not dogs with ocular disorders. I'm not sure. So it just depends on the case. Case by case.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Yeah, cuz I was thinking like my little old guy. He started out with dry eye. We treated him with meds and then diet and he was great. And then he developed paralysis on the left side of his face, so he can't blink. So now he has Panis, which is a black film over eye, I don't think we're gonna see his irises no matter what we do. So, which is a shame, because I would love to see what's going on there. This is such a cool subject, and we're out of time. It always happens this way. So, the good news is, people can find out more about what you do. So her Facebook page to connect with poppy is @holisticanimalinsights on Facebook. And then she has this one hour introductory course, which I may take, because it's so cool. It's introanimaliridology.com. And I think that this is fascinating. And I think that
Dr. Judy Morgan 25:42
even if even if we all can't become iridologists, it can be something that we could look at. And literally, you could figure out how to get a good photo of your dog's eyes or your cat's eyes, do it monthly and look at them and see what changes are occurring. And then at least that may spark something where you go in and say, Hey, I think there's something.
Poppy Phillips
Absolutely and I do do one on one consultations. So if people want their irises read, not theirs, their animals. So I have not taken the human course. And I really, really want to but it's been too busy.
Dr. Judy Morgan 26:19
Yeah, well, you know, there's just a few things going on in your life. Thank you, Poppy, very much. This has been eye opening.
Dr. Judy Morgan 26:27
But I really appreciate your time and what you're doing for the animals.
Poppy Phillips
Thank you for having me, Dr. Judy. It's an honor. I love sharing this with everyone.
Outro
Thanks for listening to another great Naturally Healthy Pets episode. Be sure to check out the show notes for some helpful links. And if you enjoy the show, please be sure to follow and listen for free on your favorite podcast app. We value your feedback and we'd love to hear from you on how we're doing. Visit DrJudyMorgan.com for healthy product recommendations, comprehensive courses, upcoming events and other fantastic resources. Until next time, keep giving your pet the vibrant life they deserve.
DISCLAIMER
The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. It is no substitute for professional care by a veterinarian, licensed nutritionist or other qualified professional. You're encouraged to do your own research and should not rely on this information as professional medical advice, diagnosis or treatment. Dr. Judy and her guests express their own views, experience and conclusions. Dr. Judy Morgan's Naturally Healthy Pets neither endorses or opposes any particular view discussed here.
