Intro 0:00
Welcome to the Naturally Healthy Pets podcast. Let's get to it.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Hello and welcome to the Naturally Healthy Pets podcast. I'm your host Dr Judy Morgan, my guest today. Dr Jeff Feinman is a pioneering holistic veterinarian and molecular biologist, because, you know, you can't have too many degrees, I guess, since 1985
Dr. Judy Morgan 0:22
and he's the founder of Holistic Actions, an online platform that empowers pet parents and professionals to understand animal health through a more holistic, compassionate lens. Sounds familiar? Dr Feinman is dedicated to providing groundbreaking resources that help pet parents make informed, nature inspired decisions about their companions' wellness, and I think you're going to be looking at things from a different framework by the end of this discussion. So I'm really excited about this. Dr, Jeff, thank you so much for agreeing to be my guest today.
Dr. Jeff Feinman
Thank you so much for having me, I really appreciate the chance to get the word out about I just said a different way to look at what we do every day with our dogs and cats and horses.
Dr. Judy Morgan 1:12
Yeah, absolutely. And so you say that there's a different way to raise and treat our pets that focuses on the healing energy of love, and I love that.
Dr. Judy Morgan 1:29
So right now, the this is a huge issue for me. I think that the veterinary profession is at a crossroads. That's not good it's not good for our pets. It's not good for our veterinary professionals. It's not good for our paraprofessionals. And so many things are going wrong, and part of that is that the conventional approach to treating disease is not following what the body needs. Agree?
Dr. Jeff Feinman 2:07
100%. I mean, that's exactly the framework. I mean, the framework is what we learned in vet school, how to work, how to use the information about what's going on in the body, so it can work again. So with antis, antibiotics, anti inflammatories.
Dr. Jeff Feinman 2:27
and we're talking about ways of working with the body, working with nature, working with the universal life force, which we know is love,
Dr. Judy Morgan 2:37
absolutely, absolutely. So you know, one of the things that we want to look at is, how do we stop just treating symptoms, and how do we instead work with the body and ask the body to come back into balance, reshape itself and heal rather than just putting out fires, which I really feel like with conventional medicine, all I ever did was put out a fire.
Dr. Jeff Feinman 3:05
That was what we were taught to do. We do it really well.
Dr. Jeff Feinman 3:10
I mean, now we're learning new molecular tools for doing it, and the way to undo it is really, really easy, and that is, do nothing, just let nature rebalance the way it always will do. I mean, that is one of the few things that I know for sure.
Dr. Jeff Feinman 3:32
Is that we are in a dynamic equilibrium. We are always changing. Our animals are always changing, and they are going to seek balance as best they can, depending on what's going on around them.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we see that even with so let's say a dog that's in kidney failure and their phosphorus levels get too high, and so we keep checking their phosphorus and calcium levels, and the body wants to keep those in balance, in the right ratios, and it's going to work very hard to do that, as long as it's capable of doing that. And that's where the problem comes. Sometimes it's not capable
Dr. Jeff Feinman
exactly, and that is, that is where good, holistic support, nutritional support, all comes in to play. But if we don't deal with the underlying cause, because really, there is just one cause for all these things. And I think, as a molecular biologist or any other scientist with a degree, they all would say that all of our cells, all of their cells in their bodies, whole cells and all living bodies only work for one reason, that's because they have the energy to do the work. They all have little powerhouses called mitochondria, and if they're not fed appropriately, and if the energy produced is not balanced, then secondary physiological things are going to happen.
Dr. Jeff Feinman 5:00
What we do is we focus only on the secondary physiologic effects.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Yeah, absolutely. So we you, you came up with some questions that would be normal pet parent questions. And I love these, and so we want to look at them from what the the significance of symptoms, susceptibility, and then using a holistic
Dr. Judy Morgan 5:28
way to look at it instead, I'm gonna, we're gonna run through a few of these. So first question, how do I kill the bacteria causing my pet's ear infection?
Dr. Jeff Feinman 5:38
Great question. That may be most, one of the most fundamental and actually, I'm hearing these, these questions for the first time. So thank you for having me do this.
Dr. Jeff Feinman 5:52
Well, the first question is, did the bacteria cause the ear infection, or are they correlated with or they associated with it. So is the cause and underlying immune imbalance that allowing normal bacteria that live in the ear. We're covered. They're covered with bacteria and yeast. But when our immune systems, when their immune systems are out of balance, they're allowed to overgrow and bacterial ear inflammation are usually not infections. There are a lot of dogs and cats that we'll see that have itchy ears, and their ears are really bothering them, but there's nothing going on in there that we can see or even smell sometimes. But that does mean that the inflammatory process has already taken hold in that area of the body, and it's our job to redirect it so it flows smoothly, because that's the bottom line, is energy flow in the body.
Dr. Judy Morgan 6:57
Yeah, so I mean, certainly from a traditional perspective with these ear infections, it's here's your antibiotic and steroid cream. It gets better for short term. It comes right back. Here we go again. It comes right back. And so that alone should be enough to tell us that, hey, every time we use an antibiotic, we kill the overgrowth that's there, but we haven't solved the underlying problem, so we need to be looking for what that is. I mean, and for me, in practice, ear infections almost always went back to the wrong diet, that because the wrong diet is kind of the root of a lot of the inflammation in the body.
Dr. Jeff Feinman 7:43
and that raises the question of, What is a wrong diet, and why is one animal not able to do well on one protein, and another does just fine? And that's what, really, I think, is the fundamental cause for all these things, and that is susceptibility, the resilient the opposite of resilience of the individual. Why are they susceptible to eating chicken as trigger to their allergies? Why are they susceptible to pollens? Why they and that's the province of energetic treatment with things like homeopathy and TCM that reduces the um susceptibility of the individual.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Yeah, absolutely All right, so we're going to go with our next question, which Flea Treatment Works best to kill fleas?
Dr. Jeff Feinman 8:42
Um? None.
Dr. Jeff Feinman 8:47
I mean, fleas are not the problem. If we're talking about flea infestation on the animal, fleas are part of our environment. They're part of the world, just like any other kind of bug. If they're infesting your dog or cat, that is probably an internal imbalance in the individual that if you give them flea chemicals to kill the fleas, you can actually worsen that imbalance of making them more likely to get fleas in the future. So as well as other diseases secondary to the chronic effect of whatever you're using for flea control, because you're killing fleas. May not be killing your dog or cat, but you're exposing them to a little bit of a chemical that may or may not affect them long term.
Dr. Judy Morgan
yeah, I'm so against the flea and tick pesticides that we put on and in our animals. It's a travesty, and it's, it's, you know, I love the point of looking at it like, why is your animal infested with fleas? Because I would have clients that would have a dozen cats in their house, indoor cats, and all the cats come in.
Dr. Judy Morgan 10:00
All the cats have fleas, but you'll have four or five that have a flea, and they're in good body shape and good condition. And then you'll get a couple of these older, skinny, muscle wasted, dehydrated, Kidney Failure cats, and they've got 10,000 fleas on them, drinking them dry. And it's like, yes, their their system is so shot that the fleas are like, all right, it's, you know, a flea is a parasite, and parasites go after the weak link. And so when you have an animal with these chronic infestations, you're absolutely right. We need to be looking at what's the underlying imbalance, what else is going on that's causing that pet to be so attractive to the parasite?
Dr. Jeff Feinman
And that actually is directly related to your ear question, because then the bigger picture question becomes, our
Dr. Jeff Feinman 10:57
bacteria, our fleas, our ticks, are any kind of parasite or germ. Are they really the problem? Or is it that the inner environment, the balance of the individual is not not correct, something is not right in diet or in the why? I mean, look at a farm. I mean, it's plants are strong and vigorous that they get what they need to grow soil, the proper water, the proper light,
Dr. Jeff Feinman 11:26
spray them with insecticides and dry them out. They're gonna be susceptible to all kinds of bugs and fungi, and they're not gonna be very healthy.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Yeah, absolutely. We're gonna take a break here. We've got more questions that we want to discuss, but we're gonna take a break to hear from our break to hear from our sponsors. Stay tuned. We'll be right back.
PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT #1
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PRODUCT SPOTLIGHT #2 12:45
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Dr. Judy Morgan
Welcome back. You're listening to the Naturally Healthy Pets Podcast. I'm Dr Judy Morgan and my guest today, Dr Feinman is all about holistic treatment for our pets and getting their bodies back into balance to solve some of the common problems. So we've discussed parasite infestations, we've discussed those chronic ear infections. So let's talk about UTIs. What antibiotics should I give for my pet's UTI? And I mean, frankly, the lower urinary tract dysfunction with cats. Half the time we don't even need antibiotics there, but they're still handed out willy nilly. So
Dr. Judy Morgan 14:44
what's that all about?
Dr. Jeff Feinman
Well, I would love to reframe that a little bit in that we call them UTI so urinary tract infections, we used to call it FUS or Feline Urological Syndrome, or feline.
Feline Urological Syndrome 15:00
I mean, obviously we're really good at labeling stuff. I mean, that's, you know, but those labels limit what we do or how we think. And a brilliant veterinarian scientists realize that that we're doing that with the infection, feline urinary infections, and he calls it Pandora syndrome. So Pandora syndrome is all those things that we discussed, and the number one cause, aside from eating dry food for cats, is enrichment. There's something in the environment that is either too boring, too stressful or both, and you can almost always help recurring urinary inflammations by enriching the environment and switching from a dry to a wet food.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Yeah, yeah. You know it's really interesting, because I read a study that over 80% of indoor cats are highly stressed, like their cortisol levels are high. They're highly stressed because we're not allowing them to do cat things, like they don't get to climb and they don't get the pounce and they don't get to hunt and they don't get to kill. And do you know the things that they're supposed to be doing. And it's really interesting, because I don't think I have ever heard a veterinarian say, Okay, your cat has chronic cystitis or chronic inflammatory bladder issues. Let's look at his environment and his enrichment that that should be part of the prescription for every one of these cats.
Dr. Jeff Feinman 16:50
Should be, I mean, that's my mission in life, is that this paradigm that we're talking about should be part of the vet school curriculum. I think it's I think it's an elective in some schools, but I think that every pet parent, every pet professional, every veterinarian, needs to know that there's another way to look at and reframe all these things that we're not taught about at Penn or Davis or Georgia or any vet school.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Yeah, no, I agree. All right, what vaccine should my pet get to protect them from disease?
Dr. Jeff Feinman 17:35
I'm going to answer that with the two words that is the answer to every medical question there is, and that is, it depends.
Dr. Judy Morgan 17:45
Yes, it does.
Dr. Jeff Feinman 17:47
So if you're in the middle of an epidemic of Parvo, the best thing is the parvo vaccine, because that's going to artificially keep your immune system, make you less susceptible in the short one, or it's supposed to it, may or may not do it. We know one thing about vaccines. We know they're always, always, always going to harm or do something to the immune system. I mean, whenever you inject anything, you know it's going to do something now, whether it protects against what it was supposed to protect against,
Dr. Jeff Feinman 18:25
questionable, yeah. I mean, there are a percentage of those Parvo dogs get the shots that are non responders to the vaccine, and they're not even going to respond, but they might get, you know, autoimmune Hemolytic Anemia from the vaccine. So I guess you know, my question is always, what do you want to do?
Dr. Judy Morgan 18:47
Yeah, yeah,
Dr. Jeff Feinman
If we're in the middle of that epidemic. Then I think the answer is pretty clear.
Dr. Jeff Feinman 18:55
But I in 40, years, yeah, and 40 years of veterinary practice, have only encountered epidemics down at the wings and angels shelter in Florida, where I used to work, and in another shelter, and that was it, middle of parvo and distemper epidemics.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Yeah. I mean, it tends to be in those closed environments where we have a lot of and again, when we look at shelter environments, those dogs that are and cats that are in shelter environments, talk about stressed, talk about immune system dysfunction. No wonder. That's where we get most of our outbreaks. It's, it's pretty disastrous.
Dr. Judy Morgan 19:39
Okay, what is the best food to boost my pet's immune system?
Dr. Jeff Feinman 19:46
I'm gonna give you the same exact answer. It depends. It depends. I mean, there are super foods, but there are also foods to us a patient with celiac disease, so I could eat really great. Wheat from Italy, that's not, you know, that good for you, but it's not good for me if somebody who's, you know, has an insensitivity to gluten in wheat.
Dr. Jeff Feinman 20:13
So in general, the better balance you are internally, the more Ferrari you could eat. So I would say to my my dietary advice is really three words, eat as varied, fresh a diet you can in moderation. Don't eat too much of anything, no matter how good you think it is. And that's why a lot of pets you know, died from eating dog food because they only ate the same food that was contaminated with melamine for day after day after day.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Yeah, yeah. I'm a huge fan of variety and rotation. And I mean, my dogs and cats don't eat the same thing two meals in a row. There's, you know, there's probably 10 or 11 different proteins in my freezer, and, you know, we're just rotating all the time. So, you know, it really is, you know. And one of the, one of my favorite sayings is you can't out supplement a bad diet. Like, I don't care how many supplements you're throwing in that bowl, if you've got a diet in there that is highly processed, filled with lots of synthetic vitamins and minerals and dyes and all the things that we know are bad for us, you can't fix it
Dr. Jeff Feinman 21:32
which is why it's so easy to fix a lot of problems, and that it's go from the ultra processed, dry and canned food to Any any fresh food, you know, you can cook it, you can eat it raw, you can do whatever you want, but it's fresh food. It's real food.
Dr. judy Morgan
Yeah, yeah, real food for sure. All right, how this one is? We hear this one all the time. How do I treat my dog's skin infection?
Dr. Jeff Feinman 21:59
Good question. If they have like hot spots, which could be called an infection. You know, there are soothing things like aloe vera that we can use while the body heals from the inside out, because manifestations on the skin are often a good sign that some detoxifying from internally. So I would say, soothe with the aloe or other soothing ointments or sprays or baths or whatever you find that soothes the individual. But at the same time, you gotta work on the diet, on the balance, energetic balance. You know, I love when people working with a veterinary homeopath or TCM veterinarian on their team, because they're gonna help to do that internal balance, rather than just a cytopoint shot or apoquel or an antibiotic, which are antis
Dr. Judy Morgan
yeah, apoquel and cytopoint, those are like dirty words.
Dr. Judy Morgan 23:04
We won't like to use those. So that's, you know, and that goes back to veterinary medicine works very hard to suppress symptoms. And so apoquel, cytopoint, steroids, which are just used like, you know, handed out like water for these animals with these recurring skin issues. And one of the other things that makes me a little bit crazy with the recurring skin issues is the antibacterial shampoos, or the antifungal shampoo. So again, we're back to that anti everything, and we're we are making the imbalance worse because we're destroying the microbiome of the good guys. We need them.
Dr. Jeff Feinman
And looking at the One Health Medicine paradigm,
Dr. Jeff Feinman 23:53
we are creating little things like MRSA and antibiotic resistance in the whole bigger world for us, as well as for them, as well as other other animals. So yeah, being like,
Dr. Jeff Feinman 24:10
I'm not gonna get on that soapbox right now.
Dr. Judy Morgan
Well, you know, I have a great story about that. One of my dogs ate a couple of socks that I didn't know about, and she ended up losing a large part of her small intestine, and was in the ICU with a feeding tube and plasma transfusions and everything else for about two weeks. And when she was discharged, where they took the feeding tube out, of course, from being in the ICU, where they have all the resistant bacteria, she had all the resistant bacteria around that hole in her side. She was about a 10 pound dog, and they sent home three different antibiotics enough for about a 250 pound dog, and said, give her these for the next two weeks for that to heal up. And I thought, there is no way in the world I am doing all of that stuff.
Dr. Judy Morgan 25:00
So I just used a topical herbal ointment healed up beautifully. Infection went away. And I was like, you know, this is why we have so much antibiotic resistance. And we just, you know, we just keep chasing down worse and worse and worse infections using, you know, antibiotics that we should never put into our animals or ourselves. But yeah, that's typical problem, but in a traditional setting, like, if I had said to them when I took the dog home, like I'm not giving any of that stuff, they probably would have come after me for malpractice, even though it was my dog.
Dr. Jeff Feinman 25:41
Yeah, and I've had many clients fired, or I've heard of many people fired by their veterinarian because they they wouldn't take the antibiotic and con the other side of the coin are those that have cupboards full of antibiotics. They always take them, but never give them. Like,
Dr. Judy Morgan 26:01
well, and that is a problem. Like, you know, people say, Well, you know, I didn't want to fight with the vet, so I took the pesticide home with me. I just never gave it, you know, and I threw it away. I'm like, why are we wasting money? Like, be brave enough to say, Yeah, I'm not doing it that way, you know, there's got to be another way to do it,
Dr. Judy Morgan 26:19
all right. So I like this one. How can I stop my cat from vomiting?
Dr. Jeff Feinman 26:24
That's I love that question, because I have to quote Pitcairn or not. Richard Pitcairn is one of the holistic leaders, some vet homeopath, trainer and Richard like to say that cat's hobby is vomiting. Enjoy vomiting
Dr. Jeff Feinman 26:43
So, you know, first of all, I couldn't agree more. There is a lot of cats that vomit, but the majority of what I see is scarf and barf
Dr. Jeff Feinman 26:55
where they eat and they vomit right afterwards. And that actually, I shouldn't make any plugs, but have a tray that you can put little dollops of food down, that really slow feeding and that that solves at least three quarters of scarf and barf that I see, but sometimes it could be hairball. I mean, the answer always again, is it depends. Sometimes could be scarf and barf. Sometimes could be hairballs. Sometimes it could be the internal immune imbalance is just causing that 4am spit up every day that a lot of cats do.
Dr. Judy Morgan
I like scarf and barf, that's a great term,
Dr. Judy Morgan 27:43
but I think, you know, a lot of times we have motility issues with the gut as well as microbiome issues. If you're, I mean, it's not normal for your cat to vomit every day. I have one who really likes to present me with hairballs quite commonly, and she's not even one of my big Shedders. So it's, it's a little interesting, but I think that there's probably a little bit of a gut motility issue going on there where she's just not able to push it on through.
Dr. judy Morgan 28:10
Because interestingly, our cats, if like my my Barn Cats, my outdoor cats, when they catch a bird, they eat all the feathers. When they catch a mouse, they eat all the I mean, they eat everything. So why aren't they getting these big clogs with these fibers that they're eating? Well, you know that, first of all, they have a lot more exercise. They you know, they're moving around a lot more. Their chi is much better. Their energy is better than the house cat, who literally walks 10 feet a day
Dr. Jeff Feinman 28:43
and has better enrichment. And yep, yeah, exactly, yeah.
Dr. Judy Morgan 28:52
Okay, we're almost out of time, so real quickly, tell us what the BEAM framework is. It's four key indicators of pet health. What are those?
Dr. Jeff Feinman
Sure, BEAN is an acronym for like balance beam, or beam of light, and stands for behavior,
Dr. Jeff Feinman 29:12
energy, appetite and mood. And the reason we focus on the BEAM score of every individual is it seems to be a direct reflection or a biomarker, as we as veterinarians would call it, of internal imbalance. So even before a physical symptom manifests, you can see an alteration in the BEAM, and we see that, I see that in the clinic almost every day, and the other side of the coin, you may have a dog or a cat with a an ear, a red ear or other fiscal issue, and their BEAM doesn't change, and they're internally, you know, focusing just on this one little isolated thing, but another animal may have BEAM that.
Dr. Jeff Feinman 30:00
Drops, as well as threadier and that animal as more of an internal imbalance being basically is a quality of life indicator. How often does your dog or cat greet the store or the fetches, the number of fetches they do, or are they picky? Are they good eaters? They eat everything. Are they vomiters?
Dr. Judy Morgan 30:28
Yeah, I think it's great. So you have a free handout for people listening, and it's a symptom checklist. It's transform your pet care journey with this essential workbook that reveals the top four symptoms to monitor, which is that the BEAM that is equips you give seven proven tracking techniques and provides a complete checklist to optimize your pet's health monitoring routine. I love it, and that is on holisticactions.com We'll put that in the show notes. Dr Feinman, we are out of time. I know it just flies by. This has been fascinating. I love what you're doing. Keep up the good work. And hopefully a lot of people will download this checklist, because I think it's something great. And, you know, I love looking at veterinary medicine from the paradigm of getting things back into balance, and hopefully, with time, we can get more veterinarians on board with that, and maybe get the veterinary schools on board. I don't know. I think it's an uphill battle. We could try
Dr. Jeff Feinman 31:34
there, there we agree, there's, there's not a lot of not love wind behind our sails.
Dr. Judy Morgan
But yeah, we're trying. Yeah. Thank you very much for your time today and everyone. Thank you for listening.
Dr. Jeff Feinman
Thank you and thank you for having me.
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.
