What is Integrative Medicine?
Integrative Medicine is using natural techniques in combination with Western conventional medicine to provide a pet with the best possible treatment options. This method considers all aspects of the pet’s life, including life style, history, and symptoms when determining a diagnosis and treatment plan.
Integrative Medicine is Centered on Love, Empathy and Respect for each pet.
Dr. VanderWall uses a mixture of natural healing arts and skills with the advantages of certain surgeries and drug therapies from conventional medicine. She will use both methods when giving recommendations for a treatment plan. Treating symptoms is often not sufficient. The underlying disease needs to be determined and treated in order to provide complete healing.
Traditional Chinese Medicine:
Traditional Chinese Medicine is a holistic method of treatment which uses nutrition, herbs and acupuncture to strengthen and promote health. The goal of this method is to restore balance to the body. Unbalance in a pet’s health causes disease and can be caused by many things such as injury, surgery, bad diet, toxins, and old age.
Nutritional Therapy:
Proper nutrition is the best preventive medicine. Often diets will need to be modified or changed completely when treating diseases. Each individual pet’s requirements are considered when dietary recommendations are made.
Herbal Medicine:
The use of specific herbs and plants for medical purposes has been practiced foe thousands of years all over the world. Herbs aim at balancing the entire body of your pet including the emotional and mental dimensions of disease as well as the physical.
Acupuncture:
Acupuncture is believed to balance, and thereby assist the body in healing disease by stimulating the points along a meridian that regulates the functioning of organs. In Western terms, acupuncture can assist the body’s efforts to heal itself by causing certain physiological changes to occur in the body. For example, acupuncture can stimulate nerves, increase blood circulation, relieve muscle spasms, and cause the release of hormones, such as endorphins (one of the body’s pain control chemicals) or cortisol (a natural steroid).
The patient, as well as the client, will be guided to a new understanding of health.
Dr. Diane VanderWall
Dr. VanderWall has received training in acupuncture and herbal therapy from the Chi Institute of Chinese Medicine of Florida with Dr. Shen Xie and herbal training with Dr. Steve Marsden and Dr. Mona Boudreaux on Chinese herbal applications.
Dr. VanderWall would be happy to answer your questions about the benefits of acupuncture and/or herbal therapy during an initial consultation appointment. At this consultation, she will review the patient’s history and suggest some recommendations based on what is uncovered. She will then determine if incorporating acupuncture and/or herbal therapy would be beneficial or if continuing Western medicine is recommended.
At this time Dr. VanderWall is our only doctor practicing integrative medicine.