Animals Are Our Teachers and The Plants Guide Them

The plants that surround us can provide healing medicine for us and our animals. There is an old wise saying which says that everything we need is growing just outside our doorstep. When we look at the number of plants that we walk around and walk over, little do we realize that those same plants could be the healing tools that our bodies are needing.

Earlier this year I attended the International Herbal Symposium from June 24-26 2011 in Norton MA. It was hosted at Wheaton College. The International Herbal Symposium was wonderful and those members of VBMA Veterinary Botanical Medical Association had such an nice time. Many of the lectures were outstanding and the herb walks were so informative. Such an encouraging gathering of herbalist and botanical experts as well as veterinarians, for a vet tract, brought together a diverse global group with interested participants from as far away as Thailand to Texas.

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With Lyme disease and cancer causing the highest number of serious and difficult cases in my veterinary profession, I believe that we need to find more natural solutions. You may find it so interesting, as I do, that many of the plants we call Weeds that are growing and spreading as nuisances could be part of the treatment plan.

My Epiphany was that the bittersweet plants which have been growing on my clinic deck since I did my addition at my hospital in 2002, has physically been trying to enter my exam windows and climb through the crevices. During a lecture and herb walk on Invasive Plant Medicine with Timothy Lee Scott  (he has a new book of that title) I found out that Oriental Bittersweet ‘Celastrus orbiculatus’ is being used to treat cancer and lyme. Those  being the two most insidious and epidemic disease I see. It literally has been waving across my window intertwining, digging into the walls and spreading all over and trying to get me to notice it and let it in the building.

The other remarkable piece was from Paul Stamets who is an amazing mushroom researcher and producer. In his keynote address he spoke about how mycelium grow. The story is that they took a mycelium and placed at the end of a maze and had two exits to that maze. The mycelium grew in all different directions to finally find a way out of the maze.

They then took the cells from the end of growth of the 1st mycelium and placed it in an exact replica maze. The mycelium grew directly toward the exits…  Amazing intelligence…
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The Herbalist there loved the Dr. Show More Calendar so much that they are thinking of doing one of their own with herbalists for 2013. Having access to wild plants that are harvested in clean locations may be an obvious opportunity to help you and your pets stay healthy. As well as herbal remedies, and natural flea and tick sprays when you visit MASH.