Integrative Medicine

As an integrative practitioner I don't throw Western medicine out. In fact I think it's an incredibly important part of treating many diseases, and so we use Eastern and Western medicine together and quite honestly they dovetail quite nicely together. So it's a very exciting way to practice medicine.

So an integrative appointment at the Drake Center basically consists of looking at a pet both from the perspective of conventional medicine, Western medicine, and from the perspective of Eastern medicine. So what's different about those two?

Western medicine we are all very familiar with. We have that for our own health and it's pretty standard. Eastern medicine basically is looking at the whole patient and not just perspective of what we are seeing on a physical exam but also the perspective of what's their emotional life like, what is their environment like, what do they do for stress relief, what can we do with nutrition. It's basically a holistic approach from the standpoint of it's encompassing many aspects of the pet's life.

The other thing it does is it looks at the patterns of disease that the pet's had in the past, so we will of course do our physical exam based on what we're seeing now but every pet that comes in has a whole history of things that they've been exposed to and had as issues before they come in. It's basically putting all that picture together and then as an integrative practitioner I do not just do "holistic medicine." That's actually a very general term that encompasses many, many different types of treatment modalities, alternative treatments. As an integrative practitioner I have learned how to do several of those.

Food therapy, I'm very much into nutrition and food. I do Eastern Chinese herbs and also at the Drake Center we have Dr. Drake and Dr. Shotwell doing acupuncture and we have laser therapy. So we have some of the treatment modalities that are considered alternative. Again, there are many.

Then as an integrative practitioner I don't throw Western medicine out. In fact I think it's an incredibly important part of treating many diseases, and so we use Eastern and Western medicine together and quite honestly they dovetail quite nicely together. So it's a very exciting way to practice medicine. I think it's really the direction that medicine needs to go in and my hope and prayer is that it continues to do so. We will continue to learn different modalities that can help our patients.

Our goal ultimately always is to help cure our patient or at least help improve their quality of life, both from the standpoint of comfort and pleasure.