Safety Keeping Your Animals Safe

Rest assured, your animals are safe in our care. We take the physical, emotional and mental safety of our patients, clients, and colleagues very seriously. Many people think herbal medicine is inherently safer than pharmaceuticals because it is natural – this isn’t the case! There are many considerations to be carefully observed, which is why we recommend seeking professional veterinary input before starting any herbs or supplements. Some of the safety measures we take here at Botanical Veterinary Care are:

  1. Obtaining a complete patient history to look at any previous reactions to foods or medications and use this to guide our treatment plan.
  2. Record any known drug interactions for the herbs we dispense, and make these clear to our clients and the primary care veterinary surgeon.
  3. Responsibly source our herbs from wholesalers who abide by Good Manufacturing Process guidelines, ensuring quality control and ethical sourcing of herbs.
  4. We use a detailed knowledge of botany, phytochemistry and physiology to make informed risk assessments on the use of every drug or herb. Some risks are herb specific (for example, pokeroot has a low safety margin, so accurate dosing is essential), others are species-specific (for example, cats are more susceptible to oxidative damage, so avoiding Allium species is sensible).
  5. We ask you to stop giving herbs at least ten days before any planned anaesthetic.
  6. We use Low-Stress Handling techniques, making the veterinary exam less stressful (often enjoyable!) for our patients.

 

We never recommend buying herbs in bulk online for relatively low prices. The best-case scenario is that these contain a lot of the wrong parts of the plant (for example, the chamomile stems, leaves and roots rather than the flowers which have the active phytochemicals), so they are likely to be less efficacious. In a worst-case scenario they can be cut with potentially dangerous substances such as steroid powder or lead, which could be fatal to our animals.

What do we mean by quality?

For our purposes, we need herbal medications of the highest quality. This means two things:

  1. The correct part of the plant is used, with the minimal amount of adulteration (wrong plant parts or wrong plants mixed in)
  2. A consistent and quantifiable amount of phytochemicals, so we know what dose will be effective

 

Our suppliers all provide quality control and quality assurance.