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Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Dr. Keesha Ewers is an integrative medicine expert, Doctor of Sexology, Family Practice ARNP, Psychotherapist, herbalist, is board certified in functional medicine and Ayurvedic medicine, and is the founder and medical director of the Academy for Integrative Medicine Health Coach Certification Program. Dr. Keesha has been in the medical field... Read More
Dr. Siegel has been a veterinarian for nearly 40 years, with the last 20 plus years practicing integrative medicine. She is an international speaker and an innovator in integrative veterinary medicine. Her practice, Pasco Veterinary Medical Center in Lutz Fl offers the widest array of alternative therapies and detoxification services... Read More
- Gain an understanding of the five energy bodies your pets have and how you affect them as an owner
- Learn the difference between dis-ease and disease
- Discover methods you can use to release trauma and attachments that cause dis-ease
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Welcome back to the reverse autoimmune disease summit series, everyone. This is version 5.0: Healing the energy body. And I’m really excited about this talk about our fur babies having energy bodies too. I’m delighted to introduce you, if you don’t already know her, to Dr. Marlene Siegel. After being told by equine veterinarians that there were no options to heal her horse, she vowed to prove them wrong and find answers where none had prior existed. This determination extended into her small animal practice in Florida. And the last 20 years of Dr. Siegel’s nearly 40 year career as a veterinarian has led her to develop the widest array of alternative therapies and detoxification services for fur babies in the country. She’s a true entrepreneur, determined to solve needs that the pet world has, and this led her to be an international speaker, an innovator, an integrated veterinary medicine, and she’s developed her own raw pet food company and supplements called evoloveraw.com. Knowing knowledge is power, she has online programs for pet parents and veterinarians to teach integrative veterinarian medicine. Welcome to this series.
Marlene Siegel, DVM
Thank you. I know that was a mouthful. Thank you for including our fur babies.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Yeah. You know, we talked on the phone and I have three currently, and so they appreciate along with me all of the work you’re doing in the world on behalf of their health. So I’m really delighted to have you here.
Marlene Siegel, DVM
Thank you.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
So one of the things that we talked about is how pet parent health will affect the pet in the household. How does that happen?
Marlene Siegel, DVM
Well, we’re energy beings and our pets are energy beings, so we’re all just energy. And there’s a physics principle, it’s not even woo-woo, that when energy’s come together they affect each other. There’s a little game, I don’t remember, Newton I think did it, and there’s these five balls that hang down and when you hit one, it impacts all of them, and then within a matter of seconds, they’re all moving in the same rhythm, even though they clonked into each other in the initial stages. And then if it wasn’t for air having friction, they would keep going forever, but they sync up with each other. So they actually share their different energies until they’re all paired together. And we see this happening in everyday life. We have girls that are living in a dorm and they’ll all end up getting their periods pretty close together. We’ve seen it where you go to a really good lecture or a motivational speaker. We’ve been listening to Tony Robbins all day. So you feel that energy of that individual and you entrain, that’s what it’s called, entrainment. And you entrain to that energy. Well, we do that with our pets now. Personally, I think that they help us more than we help them. Because when we have that really challenging day, you’re stressed out, you’re upset, you may be crying, maybe there’s a disaster going on in your life, perceived, and who comes over and gives you that unconditional love? They either sit on your lap or they put their head underneath your hand. And then as you just, without even thinking, you start petting them or touching them. And within a few minutes, even without being aware of it, you start to feel better. Maybe you smile a little bit, maybe it’s not as heavy of a burden.
So I really think that in one aspect, these animals are here to make the fifth dimension that we chose to enjoy, to make it a little bit lighter and a little bit easier. And it’s not just the fur world, we can do it when we go outside. I’m a tree hugger and I love it so I’ll own it. And I’ll go outside and I’ll touch my plants and I’ll talk to them and I’ll hug trees, and I’ll just be out in nature. And just that experience helps me to become lighter and more open. So they do play a tremendous role, but I don’t want people to feel like, oh, if my animal has cancer, I gave them that cancer. It’s not about the blame and shame game. This is really about how do we get through some of the challenging times so that we can really go into thriving and be the highest version of ourselves, and our pets help us to do that, one, by entrainment and helping to take the heaviness away. And then two, by modeling for us, what is it like to be present? What is it like to be unconditional? And that’s what they do and they do it very well. And we just have to watch them and model that behavior to get it.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
As a medical provider for humans, autoimmunity has been on the rise for several years. And you mentioned that you’re seeing it also in the pet community.
Marlene Siegel, DVM
Mm-hmm. Absolutely. In fact, I just wrote an article on adrenal fatigue in pets. Now, adrenal fatigue is becoming a… My cat was about to jump in my lap, so I moved, but adrenal fatigue is a really big topic now on the human side, where we’re starting to recognize that the adrenal-pituitary-hypothalamic axis, this mechanism that we have for dealing with stress, we are really overtaxing it. And with animals, it hasn’t even been recognized. And as I was doing the research to write my article, I thought, isn’t that interesting? Because one of the signs of early adrenal fatigue is a picky appetite. Well, I must see 50% of my patients in the early stages of their dis-ease, having a picky appetite. Owners will say, oh, they’ve always just been a fussy eater and they just won’t eat that. And when you think about it, that is really abnormal behavior for an animal, because in the wild, if you pass up a meal when it’s available, Hmm, you may not get another opportunity. So it’s really important that animals should eat voraciously, and when they don’t, that’s our first indicator of dis-ease. And then the second one for adrenal fatigue is itching. And we have so many pets with skin disease and allergies. And what do veterinarians typically do? They give them steroids or other immune suppressive agents instead of fixing the root cause of the problem, and then they actually make that adrenal fatigue worse. And then if I may go one more, we were just talking about how animals entrain to people and we share that energy. Well, think of the sad day that we live in, in at least America, and I’m sure it’s worldwide now.
So the sad day is where we as humans, we wake up by the alarm clock because you’re still exhausted and the alarm clock wakes you up. And then you’re stressed out getting to work or getting the kids to school, and you don’t eat a healthy breakfast, and you have a lot of carbs and sugar. And then it’s rush off to work and deal with all the stress of work and bosses, or if it was COVID, being stuck at home with everybody, whatever that looked like. And then it was lunch, eating the sad standard American day meal. And then the after school activities, or your after work activities, opening the mail, seeing your credit card bills, staying up late at night trying to get your work caught up, and then you’re sleep deprived and you get to start it all over the next day. So here we are having this constant state of high sympathetic tone, and we’re entraining that to our pets. So they’re feeling all of that stress and anxiety and run from the danger, but they don’t know where it’s coming from, they’re just entraining to that energy. So those are just at least three mechanisms that we can attribute to our animals picking up and entraining to the energies that we are giving off. And then if we really wanna make it worse, then if you’re feeding them processed foods and tap water, and your environment has mold and the toxic and hormone mimicking compounds, the estrogen mimicking compounds from aldehyde and fire retardants and petroleum-based cleaning products and all this other stuff. Oh my gosh. No wonder our pets are suffering from so much dis-ease.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Let’s talk about the difference between dis-ease and disease.
Marlene Siegel, DVM
Thank you for picking that up. So I really don’t believe that we have disease. It’s a word that we’ve made up in America, but when we look at Chinese medicine, and I know you’re very good in the Eastern arts, then what we’re really recognizing is when we see a symptom, it’s the body not being in balance. So when you separate dis and ease, then you’re really saying that the body just isn’t in balance anymore. And it’s that first dash light that comes on the car, right? And it says, look, there’s a problem under the hood. Now, I’m old enough to remember when that dash light actually told you what the problem was, but nowadays it comes on and it says, check engine light. And then you have to take it in and they run through a series of tests to tell you what’s wrong with the engine. Either way, we don’t go underneath the hood and pull the fuse so that the light goes away and then go, oh, look, the problem is all better because you took the symptom away. But that’s what we do in human medicine, and that’s what we do in veterinary medicine as a general rule. We’re disconnecting the symptom as a mechanism of information, and then the information has to come back again because you missed the sign. And so now it comes back as either a relapse or it comes back as a deeper, worse dis-ease.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Exactly for humans.
Marlene Siegel, DVM
It was the same model, only that animals have a shorter lifespan to be able to see it in. So it’s kind of magnified, the things that we would normally see in a human that takes 10 years, we’re seeing it in animals as early as two and three years of age. In fact, the cancer rates right now for dogs are the highest of any mammal on the planet. I looked it up and it was 1.165. So it’s almost 100% one out of… Almost 100% of dogs getting cancer, and yet we’re not stopping and going, we didn’t see cancer like this 20 years ago, 30 years ago. I’m in practice almost 40 years, and when I graduated, we saw cancer once or twice a year. It was so rare that I never even bothered learning really how to deal with cancer, ’cause it wasn’t something that I was gonna see very often. So I focused on the things I saw on a daily basis. And then about 20 years ago, 20, 25, we started seeing a shift. And I noticed that we were getting more and more chronic degenerative diseases. Even the way arthritis shows up in the animal changed. We used to see big dogs would get arthritis in their hips, we called it hip dysplasia. Now, I rarely see hip dysplasia in large dogs, but I see arthritis along the spine almost every case. It’s crazy.
So we’re seeing this rapid change over the past 20 years, which is 100% coinciding with the level of toxicity that has increased in our general world. It’s in our air, it’s in our water, it’s in our environments, and we’re just mindless as a society allowing this to happen. And our animals are like the canary in the minefield. There’s no barrier between their skin. So they’re laying on our clothes and on our sheets. And if they’re washed in xenoestrogens, then they’re absorbing all that endocrine disrupting material. And then if they’re walking around on the floor and they’re laying on it and you’ve cleaned with these petroleum-based cleaners, and the wifi in the house, all of these toxins that we may be able to leave the house and get some fresh air, a walk around the block for your pet isn’t enough. And cats, my gosh, most cats don’t even leave the house. So they’re exposed to all the electromagnetic frequency pollution, all the stress that that causes on the body. And if I can share one quick story, ’cause this is so profound in my mind right now. I have solar on my house, and I used to call my meter readings into the utilities company. Well, then they wanted to put a smart meter on my house and they said, you can no longer call in the meter. We’re gonna either put a smart meter on your house or we’re gonna take you off the solar program. And if you don’t accept that, then you lose your CO, you lose your ability to live in your house. Who knew they had that kind of control over us, right? So I agreed to the smart meter.
And it was supposed to be put in three weeks from the date that we had agreed. Unbeknownst to me, they hopped my fence and put the smart meter in. And at around that same time, I started having heart arrhythmias, I started having really bad sleep patterns. I was doing an HRV test for a friend of mine. My heart rate variability went to horrible, my deep sleep almost went to nothing. And so I’m monitoring it and I’m thinking, wow, what changed? It was so dramatic. And then they came to put the meter in and the meter reader was quite surprised and he said, I don’t understand. You already have a smart meter. And I knew when it went in ’cause I knew when I was tracking the changes in my body. So I had a Faraday cage already built to go on the meter, and I had a couple other devices that I was prepared when the meter got installed that I was gonna put in the house, and I did that. And within 12 hours, my heart arrhythmias went away, my deep sleep was restored, my brain fog went away, everything returned back to normal, and I could measure the changes, it was dramatic. So for people that, if they’re always feeling tired, if they’re always sluggish, if they always have brain fog, if those are normal behaviors for you, I would suggest that you test the amount of EMF exposure that you have and then do something to mitigate it and then see how you feel because it is dramatic and it’s affecting our animals. Keesha, they’re living seven years shorter than they did 10 years ago. Imagine. So here with all of this advanced medicine. We have a pill for the ill and a diet for the disease and we have all this Western advancement, and our pets are living seven years shorter. We’re not extending their age. They should be living into their 30s, and they’re barely making it into their early teens.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Which is heartbreaking.
Marlene Siegel, DVM
Right?
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
You told me the statistic about cancer and I’ve never had a pet have cancer. And I get them out and we go an hour and a half to three hours every morning up on the mountain. And you were saying, well, there it is, right? And I think that’s so important that there’s somewhere that you can take your dogs and let them be dogs, right? They can go off leash, they can run, and they’re out away from all of that EMF that’s in the neighborhood. So it’s-
Marlene Siegel, DVM
Well, it’s not just EMF. You feed a species appropriate diet, they’re getting clean water, they’re getting outside and they’re exercising, you do intermittent fasting with them. So you’re doing all the things that they were biologically intended to do. So therefore their bodies are able to do what they were designed to do. This is not brain science here. We have this amazing body as does our pets, and they have organs of elimination. They have the ability to detoxify, they have the ability to repair and regenerate, We have all these mechanisms, but we as a society, we have overridden these mechanisms to where they’re just bogged down, they can’t function anymore. And then we add all the extra stressors of drugs and medications to further suppress the immune system. And so it’s no wonder that we’re going to see the rates of dis-ease that we do in the world today.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
I’ll tell you that having COVID last week when I was in a dark room for three days in quarantine, ’cause my daughter was visiting and I just stayed in my room. And the dogs are considered vectors, so they were separated from me. My one year old puppy acted out, like chewed the couch, things that she never has done before. I lost two throw pillows, a couch, the corner of a carpet, like she really was not pleased. And so they definitely respond to the energy of the house. My daughter and I laugh about how there are emotional support animals that wear a vest when you take them into public and I always say, I’m the one that needs to wear the emotional support. I’m the emotional support human for my dogs.
Marlene Siegel, DVM
Absolutely.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
That was taken away from the puppy. She was not happy.
Marlene Siegel, DVM
Absolutely. And they can feel the stress and they can feel the changes.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Yeah. And that doesn’t make her a bad dog. I think that’s where people get a little off trail is not realizing that our animals are telling us something.
Marlene Siegel, DVM
Mm-hmm.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Yeah.
Marlene Siegel, DVM
you opened up that doorway, let’s just go ahead and move into that. So we look at our lives, and for many people, they are victims of their life. And I think your community is probably much more advanced than that, but it still takes a little bit of consciousness and a little bit of the ability to step away from the story and rise above it and kinda look at it and say, isn’t that interesting? What did I create that for? So with our pets, I totally, 100% passionately believe that everything happens for a reason on our life. And what does that mean? That means that if you have a particular pet with a particular challenge, and it’s showing up at a particular time in your life, there’s some significance there. And we know from Chinese medicine that each organ has things associated with the color, smell and emotion and all of that. So when we look at what the animal is experiencing and we ask ourselves, what is the blessing? What is the gift? Guys, don’t be beating yourself up thinking that you caused your animal to have a disease, it’s not about that.
It’s about looking at the situation and saying, what is being reflected back to me? It’s cool that people will do things for their pets that they won’t do for themselves. So I have people that say, my dog or my cat eat better than me. They have a better lifestyle than me. And I look at them and go, shame on you then, right? Because here they are taking you somewhere that you need to go. And maybe because you’ve made those changes for the pet, a lot of them are environmental. So now you’ve cleaned up your environment, you’ve cleaned up the house, you’ve really reduced the EMF, you got rid of the xenoestrogens, that’s benefiting the pet, it’s benefiting the family, the two-legged ones that live in that household. Probably influencing their friends and family, ’cause they’re gonna talk about it. And then it helps mother earth as well, because now we’re dumping less toxins down the toilet and down the sink. And so we’re doing many things that are improving everything in the world. And I think that’s a beautiful way to look at it is not I’m a victim, but how can I use this experience to rise to another whole level of consciousness?
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
So you have six steps to health and healing that you use to approach the medical care for our pets. Can you go through those?
Marlene Siegel, DVM
I would love to. Is it okay to say where they can get the ebook? ‘Cause it’s a free ebook.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
We’re providing it Yeah, five steps to holistic-
Marlene Siegel, DVM
All right, so, you got it. Anyhow, number one, and this is so basic. We have to stop doing the things that are causing the problems, and that looks like diet. What are you feeding your pet? I just model after nature. If nature intended animals to eat a dry kibble, they would’ve created some kind of a preservation system in nature to do so. They didn’t do that. So feeding a kibble diet, which is devoid of moisture, it destroys the enzymes that are in that food. Most of those foods have added toxins. They take all of this stuff and destroy it, extruded into a kibble, and then we expect our pets to get some kind of nutrition out of that. And if it’s a complete and balanced diet, it probably has this synthetic vitamins and minerals. The fatty acids are gonna turn rancid as soon as you open the bag. It is a disaster waiting to happen. So now if we’re feeding this to our pets, every bite of every meal is literally causing inflammation, stress, leaky gut, and then the body has to respond to that. So is it any wonder that by the time these animals reach two years, three years, four years of age, they’ve already had multiple illnesses, they’ve already had multiple rounds of medications that then further perpetuate the problem and it’s a disaster. So food is number one. We wanna feed a species appropriate, balanced, raw diet. We won’t spend a lot of time on that, but there’s more information to be had there. Water. Super important that we drink highly filtered, but not dead water. We want water that is structured, that has a lot of the toxins and pollutants taken out of it. Right now we know that there’s over 85,000 toxins discovered in tap water, and it could be more depending on where you live. So Florida has pretty nasty water.
So it’s really important that we learn what does good water look like. Because all the heavy metals that we’re seeing, a lot of them are coming through the water source and people go, I don’t understand. My animal has arsenic and strontium and all of these bad metals. Where are they getting it from? Well, mercury’s coming from the fish because there’s hardly a fish out there now because of Fukushima and all of these nuclear blasts that have occurred that don’t have heavy mercury levels. So food, water, the internal environment. We talked about electromagnetic pollution. We talked about things like air quality, mold. Making sure if you buy clothes, air them out because they have formaldehyde in them and fire retardants. If you buy new carpeting, you wanna try to get either organic or try to get it aired out because it’s off-gassing. So you don’t even realize it ’cause you may not smell it, or some people go, oh it has that fresh new smell. No, that’s toxins. We don’t want that. We did an Airbnb in a place in Orlando and it was brand new. You walked in the door and that smacked you in the face. It was so toxic from all of the new chemicals and products that they had put in the house, and it hadn’t even had a chance to air out yet. So those are just some of the things that we’re looking at.
In Florida, mold is a huge issue. I would venture to say, there’s probably more than 70, 80% of households have some degree of mold. And, of course, black mold being the worst. So you can’t see this stuff typically. You have to have your house tested. You have to look for these things. And especially if you have individuals in the household that are suffering from some form of chronic disease, whether it’s your pet or yourself or both, then you wanna be looking for these factors. If you can get rid of the things that are causing the problem, that’s over half the battle. And then the one that is really pertinent to our conversation today are the ants that live in our human brains, and those are the automatic negative thoughts that we have on a daily basis. Now, you can either be a victim and say, oh, all these negative thoughts and you live them, or you can recognize them as a program and then stop and ask yourself, is that negative thought actually serving me a purpose anymore? Am I really not enough? Am I really not having a lot of energy? Am I not smart enough? Am I not pretty enough? Am I not wealthy enough? Whatever that is that you say to yourself as a negative, you need to stop and ask yourself, is that actually helping me? And if the answer is no, then go find a practitioner that can help you to retrain and reframe what those thoughts are. Because when you have a negative thought, it creates these neurochemicals to be produced because you’re literally sending messages from your input, what your perceived, your belief systems are, you’re releasing these neurochemicals that are going to go all the way down to the cell and communicate with your DNA and let your DNA know what it needs to express based on, am I living in a hostile environment, or am I living in an environment where I can thrive? And your body’s going to adapt to that. Why is that important for your pets? Go all the way back to the beginning of the conversation of entrainment. So when you’re giving off all of these negative emotions and you’re creating these neurochemicals that are lighting up your body, lighting up the high sympathetic tone, your pet is entraining to that.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Absolutely. They can tell. When I had a brick and mortar clinic, I used to take my dogs in with me and it was so interesting. They would always know who needed to have a head placed on the lap.
Marlene Siegel, DVM
Absolutely.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
They pick it up.
Marlene Siegel, DVM
Yeah.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Yeah.
Marlene Siegel, DVM
And it’s beautiful to watch for those people who are animal in love, then you attract that to you. I know, my cat keeps walking over, your dog’s walking over.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
I’ve got all three of ’em gathered. They also have an internal clock and I feed them between 4:30 and 5:00, and it’s 4:30 here. Right on the dot. They just came in and they’re wagging. They’re like, is it time for dinner, mum?
Marlene Siegel, DVM
So step number one is stop polluting the body. You gotta stop doing the things that are causing the problem. Step number two is providing the essential nutrients that the body needs to do its job. So we are a really awesome biological machine as is our pets. Now, most of the things that our body needs, we can actually produce it. We have all these biochemical pathways that produce what your body needs, but the essential nutrients, the essential vitamins, minerals, aminos and fats, your body can’t produce those. So when they’re essential, it means that you have to get them from an outside source, i.e your diet, and your pet needs to do that as well. Well, we know that our farming practices have not been sustainable for a very long time. So a lot of our food is being grown on nutrient depleted soils. Well, if that plant doesn’t have the nutrient and you’re eating that plant or the herbivore is eating that plant, then whosever eating that is going to be nutrient deficient because it’s just not in the system. And then glyphosate added another whole level of problems, because one of the things that glyphosate does as an antibiotic, it blocks a pathway called the shikimate pathway. It’s a big, fancy word, but it’s a pathway that’s found in bacteria, and those bacteria using that pathway, produce three of the aromatic amino acids that we need in order to produce our happy neurochemicals.
So when these bacteria are no longer able to produce those aromatic amines, we are no longer able to create things like tryptophan, and melatonin, and serotonin, and dopamine. We can’t make it anymore because our body doesn’t have the building blocks to make it. So that becomes a really serious problem. And then the vitamins and minerals, they’re the co-factors that run our metabolic pathways. So I’ll take vitamin D as an example, because most people know that we need to have vitamin D. And so they either eat it in their protein source, or they, as humans, as omnivores, they go out into the sunlight and they get vitamin D converted from sunlight, but dogs and cats are carnivores. They don’t get vitamin D from the sun. They cannot produce vitamin C from sunlight. They have to eat it from their diet. So they have to get it in the protein. Well, imagine if the animal that was in that canner bag never saw daylight.
So was all of those cattle that are raised in captivity, they’re not out free range grazing on the pastures, then that animal’s gonna be deficient in vitamin D, hence when your pet eats that… And we have confirmation of that because there was a university study that was done that showed that processed foods, kibble diets being fed to animals, 85% of the animals were deficient in vitamin D. And it’s not even a test that the allopathic veterinarians are testing for. I test for vitamin D on every single one of my patients, along with magnesium and B12, and I find that conservatively speaking, 75 to 80% of the patients I test are vitamin D deficient. Yeah, and that’s important because vitamin D is what runs our innate immune system. That’s the one that runs inside of our body that we don’t have to control, it just does its thing. So if your innate immune system can’t work, ’cause it doesn’t have vitamin D and or magnesium, now you’ve just crippled your immune system in a way that it can’t respond.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Really important. And so when we’re talking about the toxicity of our world, what does detoxification mean for our pet world?
Marlene Siegel, DVM
Well, that’s number four. So number three is making sure we heal the leaky gut, which I know your audience has covered. We do the same thing for animals. We work on the microbiome, we work on healing the leaky gut, the tight junctions, we replace the mucus membrane lining of the gut. And so we do all of that support. And then number four is detoxification of the six organs of elimination. So we have the kidney, the colon, the lungs, the liver, the skin, and the lymphatics. And they all are very important, but in my opinion, I think that the liver and the lymphatics are two of the most important of the six organs of elimination because they do the most work. So if they are impaired, then let’s take the lymphatics as an example, that’s where we make our T-lymphocytes. That’s where our immune cells are coming from. And then it’s also the number one waste removal of that fluid that’s in the extracellular matrix and the blood supply, and it’s filtering through there, and then it helps to eliminate it out the body. In the liver, the liver is in charge of most of our detoxification of products that either come in through the gut or that we eat. So if your liver can’t detoxify, if it can’t turn it into a water soluble product, and then if it can’t package it into a form where the body can then eliminate it out into the intestines, then you’re just accumulating that into your fat cells.
So we are looking at liver enzymes. This is something that we can measure. So when people say, oh, I had my dog tested and everything was fine. I wanna see what those numbers are, because when you’re doing those standard CBC chemistry and thyroid testing. in the chemistries, we’re measuring the enzyme that resides in that specific tissue. So for example, in liver, there is an enzyme called ALT, and it’s very specific for liver cells. When the liver cell is dying and turns over, it releases this enzyme. So we know that there’s a normal amount of turnover that the average individual that’s healthy and vibrant, you’re gonna have some cells that are dying and then you’re gonna make new cells to replace them. So you have this turnover happening, which means that there’s going to be a range of measurable enzyme from the results of those cells that are busting apart and dying. If you were to injure the liver like an animal’s hit by a car or some other kind of a blow that affects the liver, or a drug that is liver toxic that’s killing liver cells, then you’re gonna release a lot more of those enzymes. The number’s gonna go up accordingly, and now we know that there’s been some form of liver damage. But what’s not looked at is when the numbers are low.
Because when you have that little engine chugging along, there’s a certain amount of normal, healthy cellular turnover that’s happening, but when that organ becomes so toxic and it becomes so overburdened, and it just can’t do its job anymore, it just doesn’t have the energy to get the work done, then it starts making less and less and less cells turning over, which means there’s less and less enzyme to be measured. Well, sadly, what the lab companies do over years is they keep changing the bell curve, they keep changing the average normal from the samples that they’re getting. Well, we certainly don’t have a healthier population than we did 40 years ago or 100 years ago. So what they’re doing is they’re saying, I’m gonna measure you against this unhealthy population and that’s gonna be the new normal. No, no, no, no, no. I wanna be measured against what healthy was, and then how do I measure up against that? So that’s a takeaway for a lot of pet owners that are watching is that, if you really wanna know the health of your animal’s liver, then you need to look at that number, and it should be in the middle to high 40s or 90s, somewhere between 45 and 90 would be a nice range, and that tells me that that liver is doing its job, it’s chunking along. Some of the cells are dying because of just attrition and then we’re replacing that with newer, healthier cells.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Beautiful.
Marlene Siegel, DVM
So that’s number four. Can I just touch a little bit more on detoxification?
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Mm-hmm.
Marlene Siegel, DVM
Because there’s so many different things that we can do, and I’m actually gonna be opening up detox centers for pets and their parents, because this is so important. You know, A, you have to stop polluting the body, B, you have to give it all the things that need to do its job. You gotta repair the leaky gut. And then in order to take it to the next level, these organs have to be working. So we use salt booth therapy to clean our lungs. And we literally go into a booth that looks like a telephone booth, and it makes us aerosolized microparticles of sodium chloride, it’s a medical grade salt, and we have the patients breathing it in. We have ’em look up so it gets in their eyes. They breathe through their nose. We let ’em open their mouth and pant. It gets on their skin, so it’s great for skincare as well. And so salt therapy is one of the things we use. We use infrared therapy. I like full spectrum, and why? Because that’s what nature did Nature made the sun, and it has far, near and mid range frequencies based on what time of day you go outside. So we don’t have time to sit out in the sun 12 hours a day, I get it. So how can we modify that? Well, we can either do an infrared sauna, preferably full spectrum in my opinion, but we also have these full spectrum pads.
And the animals can lay on the pad. And they’re smart. They know when they need it and they know when they’re done, it’s pretty intuitive on their part. So I like using that for the infrared. Ozone is another wonderful product that we use for detoxification, and hyperbaric oxygen. I can go on and on. There’s so many different things. My take home message for the listeners is that we don’t have to be passive bystanders and victims to our organs of elimination becoming toxic and diseased, right? We can nourish the kidneys with herbs and with a variety of different homeopathics, but we have to consciously know what we’re doing. I think a lot of people these days, they hear on the news, oh, curcumin, it’s wonderful for this, and hawthorn, it’s wonderful for that. And it’s great, but they’re missing the basics, they’re missing, what does the body essentially need? And then anything you do on top of that, wonderful, it’s gravy. Now you’ve actually enhanced the body’s ability to work and do its job, and then anything you do on top of that is wonderful. And then number five is the mitochondria. Wouldn’t it be nicer if we could just jump to the mitochondria, but it doesn’t work that way. So those are the little powerhouses that make the energy that runs our body, but they also do a lot of other things. Besides making energy, they produce communication signals.
They actually produce ozone. I don’t know if most people realize that, but we know ozone is made in the stratosphere. We can certainly make it out of a little machine, and our mitochondria make ozone. Ozone is one of the redox signaling molecules that our body uses to act like a cell tower. So when we make a phone call on our cell phone, it doesn’t miraculously go to the person on the other end, it has to get transmitted through cell towers. So the signal is picked up and transferred to the next one, picked up and transferred to the next one, until eventually gets to the end user. But if you’re out in an area that doesn’t have any cell towers, ah, you don’t have any cell phone usage. We’ve all experienced that before. So the same thing happens in our body. All these microorganisms, the bacteria are producing millions and trillions of these redox signaling molecules that help to carry information to the end user, which is that communication between the mitochondria and the microbiome, all those organisms that live on and in us. So it’s super important that we learn, what can we do to support the mitochondria? Ozone is another wonderful example of something that we can do easily and very cost effectively, either in a practitioner’s office or at home. They make home ozone kits now for people to be able to use. Not to be abused, but if taught properly is a wonderful mechanism. And then last but not least, the book has five, but number six is actually clearing the trapped emotions. And our conversation is coming back to the beginning where we talked about all the energy bodies and how they relate to each other. Do you wanna jump into that one?
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Yeah, we are out of time.
Marlene Siegel, DVM
Guys, we’ll have to do this again.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
I know. But I think we covered it in the earlier part. So this feels like closing the loop nicely.
Marlene Siegel, DVM
Okay.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
Yeah. Dr. Siegel, thank you so much for spending your time and just sharing just even the fraction of your wisdom.
Marlene Siegel, DVM
Well, I hope that with all of that, that people can take one or two pearls away and then just start to implement that into your lifestyle. Don’t feel like you have to change everything day one. Pick one thing to start and one thing to stop. And then when that’s comfortable, go back to the recording and pick another thing to start and pick another thing to stop. And before long, you’ve made massive changes for your pet and for yourself.
Keesha Ewers, PhD, ARNP-FNP-C, AAP, IFM-C
That’s great advice. Yeah, that’s great advice. All right, everybody until next time, be well.
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