Benefits of Chinese Herbal Medicine for Heart Health

Welcome everyone. We are in our Heart Week Focus Week, because what else would you talk about in February? February is for lovers, I think, but it's very cold. I think it's for lovers because it's so cold, we have to, ugh. Anyway, so today I have two amazing guests, Karn and Steve Marsden, and I don't have your bios in front of me, but let me just say, these two people are brilliant veterinarians. I know that Dr. Steve is also a homeopath. He does oriental medicine for both people and animals. Karn, are you a homeopath too? No, I'm just a regular old veterinarian. Just a regular old veterinarian. Yes, and. But very brilliant. So I'm excited to have the two of you on as my guests today because in October in Orlando, at our International Naturally Healthy Pets Experience put on by All Provide, you two will be speakers at that event and people will get to meet you in person and ask you all their questions. You know, it's kind of like when you go to that cocktail party and all your friends are like, what do I do with my dog who has this? Yes. Except you'll have 500 people in the room. So we promise to torture you, but for those of you who are watching, if you haven't gotten a ticket yet, you're going to want to. Anyway, so we want to talk about heart disease and basically heart disease in dogs and cats, what we do kind of depends on the stage of things, but there's actually for heart disease, a class or stage A, especially for the mitral valve disease for the dogs is no murmur, no enlarged heart, no nothing, just being a breed that is predisposed to heart disease. So if we own one of those breeds like me, like this little guy in the background there, what are your recommendations? Like what's the baseline that people need to be just saying, hey, I've got a breed that might have an issue. What do I need to do? I feel like this is one of the most important parts about being a veterinarian. I know when people come in, the first thing they ask you, and they told you this in vet school is, how do I feed my dog? I try to let people know, and I know Steve as well, we practiced together for decades, is just like, you know, how can I specialize the treatment for Banjo? Like Banjo is a boxer or Banjo is a Cavalier or Banjo is a Great Dane. So what do you do? So those, for sure, we do advocate for whole food diets because that's where all the nutrition is for this big, big, important muscle. So if you already know that your pet is gonna have an issue with heart disease statistically in the breed or the breed cross, then of course that's the way to go for anybody who's a giant. I try to advocate for a whole food diet and for CoQ10. CoQ10's a antioxidant, it's really commonly used by cardiologists in people. I was gonna say, not the veterinary cardiologists that I've heard from. I know, it's crazy. They always say, oh, there's no proof, yep, blah, blah. They have an expression that they themselves use, which is like absence of proof is not proof of absence. And it totally applies here. Everyone's heart muscle runs actually on CoQ10. It's not a supplement. It's actually in your heart already. It's responsible for making the energy that the heart uses to pump. All you're doing is giving more. And it's in mammals. I found it fascinating. I went to Tufts University in Boston, wonderful veterinary school. The first year of veterinary school in that first semester, we were with the med students for cardiology. I was thinking about this. It was really funny. We had us all in our jeans and plaid shirts, and we had the med students looking much nicer than us, obviously, going to get paid differently than we would, but we were all in cardiology together. And I remember the med students just being like, wow, why are we with the vets? It's because we're mammals. So I can't attest to a veterinary cardiologist saying it doesn't help. I can attest to being a vet on my 26th year of practice where I have used this, and I think it helps, not to mention it's antioxidant. And when I did my research for my lectures, Jennifer Aniston takes it, and she looks great. So there you go. Where's the argument? Well, there was a great study out of Thailand probably like 10 years ago where they actually took a bunch of dogs and they divided them at 11 kilograms, so 22 pounds. And they all had enlarged hearts and murmurs at the start of the study, and they gave 100 milligrams of CoQ10 twice a day to all the dogs, no matter what size they were. And in the dogs that were under 11 kilograms, the murmurs either went down or disappeared, and the heart size shrunk. So we do actually have studies in dogs for CoQ10. I mean, if you can get your cat to take it, go for it. But I, my dogs start, because I have Cavaliers, my dogs start on CoQ10 pretty much right at the beginning, definitely by like age three, because that's when we're starting to, because their body does make it, they just don't make it as well as they age, and the same with us. Yeah, I think they're fine. So what dose do you go with on that? Because I find that the recommended veterinary doses are way too low. They are low. And I think because it is something for all mammals, it's easy to find a supplement over the counter, which is something that Steve and I have really advocated for since COVID, because people don't have access to veterinarians. Now, veterinarians often sell it in the 30 milligram or 60 milligram, but as those studies show, I usually put the dogs on the human dose. You know, which is 100 milligrams usually. Yeah. So yeah, the dose I use for them is actually five to 10 milligrams per pound twice a day. So some of them, like the Danes and the big dogs, they're taking a boatload, but it's not expensive and you can't do anything with it. There's no toxic risk because your body is supposed to be loaded with it anyway. So if in doubt, give more. Yup. All right, so how do you, how do you keep disease from progressing more rapidly and try to put off taking medication for as long as possible? Because there's even a lot of discord in the cardiology world about when do you start this drug? When do you start this drug? And it's really interesting because I see records all the time and one dog will be at a much later stage and not on medications or they're on something really mild. And then we have others where they get started much earlier. So for someone who did not want to start the medications, if they wanted to put that off, what kind of things do you recommend? Well, I think you have to know what exactly is going in the heart, but I just wanted to touch back on something you said about remodeling. It's something that I really try to explain to people on Soda Steve that the heart is still capable of remodeling in a positive way. And it would be incredibly important if someone chose, when the heart had changed in their dog already, had chose not to do meds, that they at least change the diet. And I had a client about 15 or 20 years ago came in and she was so distressed because she was trying to home cook. And she'd gone online with a veterinary nutritionist who told her that the only way to get taurine, she's so worried about the taurine, was with the eyeballs. And she didn't know how to source the eyeballs. She's freaking out. Where do I get, Dr. Marston, where do I find the eyeballs? And I was, wait, what? Because let's tell everyone out there, it's in meats and really high in chicken, dark meat for chicken, but taurine is now supplemented in everything. So we got into trouble with commercial cat food because the taurine didn't get absorbed and their hearts got all floppy. We aren't talking about how those dogs now have been able to very successfully, vast majority, remodel their hearts, even after they had dilation, back to normal hearts once they got taurine, once they got a whole food diet. So that's hugely important. I know you believe in that. I know Steve believes in that. And I'll let you talk, honey. We're married, so, you know, voila. I mean, the way I had noticed that when I first started doing Chinese medicine and I first started treating heart problems, that I decided, well, I should just treat the Chinese medical diagnosis and see what happens. And what I found was that I didn't need to do anything special for the heart. I just needed to look after that patient's overall circulation. And if I took care of that, then the heart problems seem to not progress. The murmurs seem to get quieter. And as Karin just said, the heart actually seems to shrink. So I use Chinese herbs as, after you've instituted a real food diet, then the next thing I do is layer in Chinese herbal medicine. And you know what the cool thing is, is that a lot of the things that you're gonna do later, like let's say you're going to a cardiologist and they're gonna give you hypotensive drugs and they're gonna give you calcium channel blockers like imabendan or whatever. The neat thing is, when we use these circulation supporting herbs from a Chinese medical point of view, they have all those actions in them. So it's not like you're not doing what the drugs are supposed to do. You're just doing it way earlier and a much lower level. And the effect is that heart disease doesn't progress. You don't have to sit there on your hands and wait for things to get bad and then hit them with drugs that might be harmful. You can just go ahead and start treating them right away and you won't be neglecting anything. You'll be actually starting to invoke the same mechanisms. I just think that's really cool. Yeah, I think that's really cool too. And interestingly, my 16 and a half year old English toy has about a grade five murmur and he's not on any meds, but he is on a bunch of mushrooms and a bunch of herbs and he's still bouncing around. And he also has cancer in his bladder, but he doesn't know, so we're not telling him. And he just runs around the house, bounces around the house, plays with the two-year-old puppies. And I'm like, what are you doing, dude? You've got heart disease. And he's like, meh. Whatever. Yeah. So it is very cool. He's one of my best case studies because I've had dogs with stage D, but we get, unfortunately, when my last Cavalier that I lost went into stage D failure, I took him to my cardiologist who I had been using for 35 years. Dear friend, love him dearly. And he's really funny with my clients. He would always say, okay, here's your medications and then go do whatever voodoo she tells you to do because she seems to keep them alive longer. But my stage D dog was given two to three months to live. And I just looked at him and said, Mike, come on, you don't really believe that with me, do you? And 24 months of, I mean, he was on meds, but 24 months of really high quality life. And I don't know which one gave out first, his kidneys or his heart. I think his heart was actually the bigger problem, but Torsamide is pretty nasty drug, but he was on it for two years before it became a problem. So I think that's amazing. So what herbs do you like to use? And for those who don't know, Dr. Steve is the formulator for gold standard herbs. We carry a lot of them because they are amazing. By the way, my cocker who knocked his patella at a place running through the door with another dog and he hit the door jam, he was three-legged lame and I put him on a Voltrix, I believe. Amazing, amazing. About two and a half weeks, he's back to normal, racing around like crazy, going on his walks. So I love your formulas. So for those who have an animal that has been diagnosed with a murmur or they're, so would you start herbs? So for instance, those stage A dogs, you're a breed prone to, you're a Great Dane, you're a boxer, you're a Cavalier. Would you start them on herbs before they're symptomatic or before they have murmurs? Well, if they have other things going on, and this is something I think Karin can tell us a bit more about, but if they have something else going on, then just supporting them in general is gonna be supporting their heart. Karin just had a recent case of that. Didn't you? An older dog. Well, there's that formula in that gold standard line called Sessorex. And what you were just talking about, Jodi, it's rare when they get older that that's just one thing. And plus your heart is pushing your blood everywhere in your body, right? So you're gonna have, your kidneys are controlling your blood pressure of all kinds of things. So Sessorex actually has a lot of plants in it that are not only good for your heart, they're good for your liver, good for your kidneys, kind of overall support. So if you had a dog that was at risk, like say you had a little Cavalier, just saying, because you might. Just saying. That you might, and it had some skin itchies, you might consider putting it on Sessorex, which is over the counter, which is so nice. And very, yeah. And has a lot of the things that you might need. As dogs progress, we haven't really talked about the difference between, people often, they hear the murmur and they think their dog has congestive heart failure. They do not have heart failure until they have heart failure. For my babies, not my personal babies, but like my patients that are my babies that are in congestive heart failure, they've been in an oxygen tank. They have fluid in their body where it shouldn't be. I do house calls if I can, and I would advocate for any veterinarian to do that for you if you have a dog that gets really unstable or purpley when they're excited. I have been doing that for a long, long time. I would drive through the snow, I would drive through the sun, just to make sure that they're stable because they can live for years like yours did if they don't have to go into a stressful situation. So I do house calls, they go on Real Food, and they go on an herbal formula for sure. And then we always use Dandelion. Dandelion is the whole plant, the flowering part. That's a potassium-sparing loop diuretic. It can be used safely with all the diuretics. So we all know the water pills that humans take, Lasix, these diuretics, really, really, really, really common. And as far as drugs, I mean, a lot of these animals are on drugs, but you can safely give these plants and give much lower doses. So often, if I had a new grad with me, a new vet, she'd be like, oh, that seems like a low Lasix dose. And I'm like, well, they're on Dandelion too, which is the same mechanism of action. They're both working at the kidneys at the same little place. It's at once saving potassium in your body, and the other can damage it. But if you can use low doses, that's like the best. And then they just do so well. Yeah, yeah. Dandelion is one of my favorites because I use it for liver cheese stagnation, and I use it for kidney issues. I use it for heart issues. I'm a huge fan of Dandelion. Getting back to the Sessorex for a second, it's for allergies. However, it just so happens that a lot of the ingredients do exactly what we wanna have happen in dogs to kind of stop the progression of heart failure or to start reversing things if it's already there. So there are herbs in there, there are bronchodilators that help to stop coughing, which is a major symptom. It has a calcium channel blocking activity, so it helps to resist hypertension, helps to lower blood pressure significantly, so the heart doesn't have to work as hard inside the dog. But the coolest thing about herbs, I find, is there's something in the Sessorex called ginseng, and ginseng is what's called a calcineurin inhibitor. So your vision or my vision of congestive heart failure would be that your heart is pumping away and there's lots of pressure it's pumping against, it's not working, and slowly just filling up with blood because of all this back pressure, and the heart just gets bigger and bigger and bigger, and we get this idea that the heart is stretching because of a bunch of back pressure. Not true. The heart actually is deliberately remodeling itself, and it does so through something called calcineurin, which causes the heart to dilate. So if you use herbs that inhibit calcineurin, guess what? Studies have shown that the heart shrinks back to a normal size. This is something that's been duplicated over and over in laboratory studies. So ginseng is a calcineurin inhibitor, which makes it incredibly useful, not just as a single herb, but incredibly useful as part of that formula, and also if you wanted to add more in, to kind of help to stop that swelling of the heart and get it to shrink back down. Something else that works well is hawthorn. So we always use hawthorn for that. The first animal I ever, it was a cat, it was a cat with dilated cardiomyopathy, and it was one of the first cardiac cases I ever treated. It's still living in Oregon, and the ultrasonographer did an ultrasound, saw the hypertrophic cardiomyopathy, and then this owner says, well, I want to use holistic medicine. So one of the things I put the cat on was hawthorn, and they repeated the ultrasound like two months later, and the cardiomyopathy was normal, the hypertrophy had gone. The ultrasonographer accused the veterinarian, it wasn't me, accused the veterinarian of swapping out cats just to mess with their cat. And so there's a lot of plants that have this activity, hawthorn and ginseng among them. And because they have this shared mechanism with drugs, that's why, as Karin is saying, you can end up not using as many, as high doses of drugs, and that's bound to be just safer for the pet. And it also means, as Karin was saying, that you can actually use these things with drugs. They're not incompatible at all. They're on the same page. It's just that the herbs bring more to the table. Now, your Sessorex says for use in dogs only. Is there something in here that cats can't take? No, it's fine for cats. Yeah, the reason why it's just, because that was marketed initially as an allergy product. Cats, they're all over the map in terms of what's driving their allergies. There's a lot, there's more variation. So they didn't feel like they could say, kind of in good conscience, market it for cats as an allergy treatment, knowing that a significant number of cats wouldn't respond. But most dogs that chew allergies will respond. But we could use it for our kitty cats with heart disease. Yeah, lots of people do. Cool. Yeah. Yeah, I learned something today. I always learn something when I talk to you guys. So anything else you wanna add that we haven't discussed? This is like a lot of information. Anything we missed? Well, I love that you said you love dandelion. I lecture on it a lot when I lecture to cats and the public. And they did a study with Chinese herbal practitioners in China who are treating humans. And they said, one of their questions was, if you had one plant that you could use, and you couldn't use anything else, what would you choose? And these very well-esteemed, famous Chinese herbal practitioners, acupuncturists, they said, troxicum, which is dandelion, because it has so many things that can help you in it. So I think sometimes with cats, it's very hard to get them to take medicines. And so it can be the same with little white dogs, I find. A lot of little white dogs have heart disease, right? Mitral valve disease. And so I had one case and his name was Henry. He was a little white dog. He was 13. He'd been in oxygen twice. He was a house call. And so I go out to him, this is in Northern Alberta, and he was a little violent. He didn't really love me. So he got very worked up and he didn't have great teeth. And the dandelion extract that I was trying to use, that I use, is usually in a glycerin extract. There are multiple companies that make these. I don't like to give them alcohol, but she couldn't get it in. So she had gone and just bought a packet from the health food store of literally dandelion that was dried up. The root and the aerial part, the whole plant. So roots are more famous for liver and your kidneys, but the aerial part is the part that helps with the pulmonary edema. And she said, I don't know if this is any good, but I'm making a tea. And she would make it. And he lived for two years on this. Two years when he had been supposed to be euthanized the week I met him. Like, he truly was a very, very sick little dog. And he had a great little, he still could bite me. His big goal was, I'll tell ya, he really, he did a great job. I knew he was feeling well, if he was like, I'm gonna kill you. I used to have those kinds of patients too. I'm like, oh, he's not trying to attack me today. This is not good. This was like, oh. Well, maybe the dandelion would help a little bit with his little liver chief stagnation and anger issues. Right? Yes. Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's funny. I have people who are now purposely growing dandelions and like planting them in their gardens so that they can harvest them and put them in the freezer. It's amazing. Let's go to any public park. He's so funny. Steve's totally against like dandelions in the yard. Yeah. Which is really funny. He's our herbalist. We've gotta have boundaries. Well, I've gotten a lot of people to stop spraying their dandelions. So we're saving the environment and we're picking them. So, you know, it's a win-win. Yeah. That and ginseng. You know, I do tell people, I do think that ginseng is such a famous chi tonic and overall it will just make them feel so good and run around like you're old guys. So ginseng's in a lot of Chinese herbal formulas that have been around for thousands and thousands of years. It's totally safe. It's totally bioavailable. It makes you feel fantastic. And my entire staff during COVID was taking ginseng. Or, you know, we probably, you know, we decreased our coffee bill by 50% because we just started taking ginseng. So. Well, that's probably a good thing. So if we could just bottom line it for you, we would say that, you know, the dogs that don't have murmurs yet, but you're thinking that they're going to, that's stage A or whatever that you mentioned, just the diet and CoQ10. And then as soon as that murmur is appearing, probably something like Sessorex. And then as the congestion appears, you got to get your dandelion going. And to do all this is to not to put yourself at odds with a cardiologist. You can follow their advice as well. And you know that as you follow both paths, there's going to be synergies between them. And you don't actually have to choose one path or the other. Good advice. Before we sign off, I'm going to open this can of worms, DCM. That's not a can of worms. I do think that is one of the most common questions. And I certainly have seen dogs that were on commercial kibbles that got dilated cardiomyopathy, even though we now are not thinking that it's linked. The cardiologists out there are still writing their cardiac ultrasound reports. They're very specifically saying not to feed a grain-free diet. So I did have a conversation very recently with the cardiologist who is doing most of the ECHOs in San Diego, which is where I practice. And I said, you do know that these are animals that were on processed food diets. If you're going to say that, which is a whole different thing, what about the animals that are on grain-free diets that are whole foods? These are raw food diets or home-cooked diets. None of these animals had a problem. So I think that it's irresponsible to say that people can't give grains when what you're saying is against real food. And he had nothing to say. Didn't like the comment, didn't like the conversation at all because we have to be very scientific about these things. We need to take a breath because everybody's so worked up. I do feel like the healthiest animals I see, I, you know, again, I went to Tufts. It's a great vet school. We were required to take nutrition before we graduated. We had to know how to cook for an animal before we graduated. You know what? They sprung us out in the nineties and I was like, we're all going to cook. And guess how many of my patients wanted to cook for their dogs? Nobody wants to cook for their dog. They didn't want to cook for themselves. Right? It was the nineties. We were busy, you know? So I think that my two cents is that, that we need to take a breath and think about real food diets for animals. And also know that there is a very small, there's a group of dogs predisposed to heart disease. Whatever happened in the processing of that kibble, whether it caused it or it didn't, it's, I really think of it as processed food versus real food, because that's, to me, in my experience, my real experience, every single day when I'm talking to an owner and explaining to them, your dog's heart is, and they're crying. Like, what can I say? This is what we're going to do. And you know, my dogs that go onto these protocols and they're on drugs and herbs and real food, their hearts remodel in a very, and they keep going past this, you know? So we're going to learn from this. Like, we're going to learn from this and go forward. You know, the FDA, they largely walked back most of what they had to say about DCM. They certainly don't look at it as a low carb diet issue. If they were circling around anything at the end of their investigation, it was the use of processed lentils in the foods. And if there was a culprit, it might have been there, but they couldn't even really solidly make that claim. So they finally just said, we're giving up on this as an issue. In this, they were able to take DCM dogs and actually get control of their hearts using low carb foods. So they knew it wasn't low carb versus not low carb. It seemed to be around the lentils. Now, when I asked veterinary nutritionists, does this ever happen on low carb real food? And the answer is no. It was never a function of low carb fresh food diets. And then I asked, so is it a problem with beans or lentils like legumes if somebody puts those into their fresh food diets? And the answer was, no, it's not. So the kind of diets that you've been advocating all this time, they're fine. They're absolutely fine. There is no problem with those leading to any sort of DCM. Yeah, and I get so much pushback, but my doctor says I have to put grains in there and my dogs have never eaten grains. I mean, it's just not something that I would do. They have no requirement for carbohydrates in their diet, no requirement for grains. And it just saddens me that the veterinary community has latched on to this and ignores the fact that FDA in their statement, December of 2022, said we have not been able to find a link between grain-free diets and DCM. And for some reason, everybody just ignores that and they've just latched onto this and everybody has to be on grains and your diets can only be from the big three main players. And I think that that is just not good medicine. I do think that, and I might be just a softy, I feel sorry for veterinarians right now. They're scared. Like, and I think a lot of these comments are fear-based. They're just like, well, I don't wanna say anything. There might be anything, they could do anything. And everything's really litigious in the United States. So practicing, I'm licensed in Canada and the US and I just came back from New Zealand practicing. So I practice all over and you can really see in the United States. So just to dial it back to vets for a little bit, which maybe it's being super kind of me, but I see these young grads coming out and they're scared and it's litigious and everything has to be signed and they don't get any nutrition in school and they're overworked and we're down 47,000 veterinarians in the United States and people are killing themselves with euthanasia solution. Like, it is a dark period for veterinarians, I have to say, though truly. And all I wanna do is mentor them and explain to them, like, it's okay, because if you feed this, think about it, it's gonna be okay. And then they're like, okay, and they calm down. But when they're moving and someone's like, can I do this? They're like, no, they're falling into this. And that is a bigger problem than just dilated cardiomyopathy and FDA saying it's okay. That's pointing to something changing in our profession and how do we address that? And that's a whole nother podcast that I will, you know. I love it, I think we're gonna schedule that conversation because I agree and it's funny, I have had recently a lot of young veterinarians reaching out to me wanting to know if we have a mentoring group or, you know, so I've just been doing one-on-one calls with them, but I would love to form, I would love to form a group. That was a six-four mentor. Sorry, sorry. But I would love to form a group where people who want to have a more holistic aspect who they're very confused, they're working in traditional practice and they're being told you have to sell this number of vaccines and this number of these medications. And I think they're frustrated and if it's not where your mind wants to go, where are we off topic? But if it's not where their mind wants to go, it's very frustrating. One I'm speaking with today, she's doing relief work and she's holistic. Well, can you imagine being a holistic practitioner in a traditional practice where you're told, no, they all have to get rabies vaccines every year or no, they all have to be on a flea and tick medication. And that's one of the reasons I cannot go back into practice, it's hard. But I do think we have so much more power than we realize is holistic, integrated practitioners. I really do, because it's what the public wants. It is public driven. They're smart. You guys, hello, you're smart. You know, and they're so grateful when I talk to them about nutrition. And I'm like, this isn't a brag, but like I won best vet in La Jolla because I sit down and talk about nutrition and I didn't take that path. I know I'm old lady now, I've been out for a while, but like, I know they want those mentors, Dr. Judy. I know they do. You would be amazing. I think we need to create it and respect what the public wants, right? Like we're going to mentor these vets. We're going to help you out. We're going to talk to you about nutrition and these core things that we used to do as vets. We're going to be counterculture. I've been counterculture for so long now. It keeps getting me in trouble. I think there's something to that. People need to be able to trust both the vets and the people. Yeah, exactly. All right. Thank you so much. As usual, you guys always blow my mind. You're amazing. You're brilliant. I can't wait for our big event in Orlando because it's going to be so much fun because the group of speakers that we have is just like, we picked the cream of the crop for this. So, we've really got just amazing people and I'm so glad that both of you decided to do it together because you're a great duo and I can't wait for it. So, thank you very much. Go out and do something fun with the rest of your day. Happy Valentine's Day, I hope. Yeah. What? Happy Valentine's Day. Oh, yeah. That too. All right. Thanks, guys.