Everything I Thought I Knew About Animal Health Was Wrong
When I graduated from veterinary school, I believed I had learned everything I needed to help animals live healthier lives. After several years practicing conventional veterinary medicine, I realized I was taught how to diagnose and treat disease—but not necessarily how to create lasting animal health. Like many veterinarians, my education emphasized diagnosing disease and prescribing treatments, with little focus on nutrition, lifestyle, or long-term wellness. That realization led me to holistic veterinary care.
The turning point came while attending veterinary school in the Caribbean. Living on a small Caribbean island meant eating fresh, whole foods instead of processed convenience foods. Without trying, I lost weight and felt healthier than I had in years. When I returned to the United States and resumed a typical American diet, many of those improvements disappeared. That experience taught me a lesson I had never learned in veterinary school: nutrition plays a fundamental role in health—for both people and pets.
The Questions That Arise in Daily Veterinary Practice
My biggest shift in thinking didn’t happen in veterinary school—it happened after I began practicing. The longer I practiced, the more certain questions became impossible to ignore.
- Why do some pets have obvious vaccine reactions?
- Why do we say vaccines are safe, but we consider it malpractice to give vaccines to a pet with an immune-mediated disease?
- Why do so many pets have “allergies?”
- Why do so many conditions stay unresolved, never go away, and require lifelong drugs to simply suppress the symptoms?
The more patients I treated, the more I realized we were managing symptoms instead of asking why they developed. I also began questioning whether every pet should receive the exact same vaccine schedule regardless of age, health history, immune status, or individual risk. I came to believe that preventive medicine should be personalized—not one-size-fits-all.
As my career took me to veterinary clinics across the country, I kept hearing the same thing:
“The allergies are terrible here.“
At first, I blamed geography. But after hearing the same explanation across the country, I realized something else connected these pets. Instead, I started looking for what these pets had in common. Across different regions, I began seeing the same patterns: highly processed diets, chronic inflammation, recurring allergies, digestive issues, and immune-related conditions. The similarities were too consistent for me to dismiss as coincidence.
That realization sparked a new direction in my education. Rather than accepting chronic disease as inevitable, I began studying nutrition, immune health, and the principles of holistic veterinary care to better understand the root causes behind the conditions I saw every day. The more I learned, the more convinced I became that supporting overall wellness—not simply treating symptoms—could help many pets live healthier lives.
The Big Epiphany
As a trail runner, reading Born to Run reinforced something I had already begun to experience firsthand: both people and animals thrive when they eat and live as they were designed to. The healthier I became by eating real, minimally processed foods, the more I questioned whether the same principles applied to my patients.
Then one case changed everything.
While working at a small veterinary clinic, our lead veterinary technician brought me the results of an allergy test because the supervising veterinarian was out that day. The original blood sample had been lost in transit, so a second sample was collected two weeks later. When the laboratory finally returned both reports, I noticed something remarkable.
The allergy results were dramatically different.
That single moment challenged everything I thought I knew about allergies and immune health. Because I had already experienced the impact of real food on my own health, I began asking whether nutrition and gut inflammation were influencing the immune system in ways I never knew. Actually, the gut inflammation causes the immune system to react to anything and everything, in no particular order. That’s the day I started seeking alternative education on nutrition and the immune system.
Why I Chose to Practice Holistic Veterinary Care
The more I learned, the stronger my convictions became. I no longer believed every patient needed the same standardized recommendations. I became convinced that nutrition matters, that chronic inflammation deserves attention, and that preventive care should be individualized.
That conviction ultimately led me to leave conventional practice and build an independent practice dedicated to holistic veterinary care. My goal isn’t to reject conventional veterinary medicine. Emergency medicine, surgery, diagnostics, and many medical treatments save lives every day, and they remain essential tools when they’re truly needed. My goal is to focus on a proactive, whole-body approach that emphasizes nutrition and long-term wellness to promote disease prevention.
As a holistic veterinarian, I believe animal health is more than the absence of disease. Every pet is unique. Every patient deserves an individualized approach that looks beyond a diagnosis to understand the whole animal.
Those beliefs inspired both my practice and my book, Why Our Pets Are Unhealthy, where I explore many of these ideas in greater depth.
If you’re looking for a holistic veterinarian who believes in asking better questions, searching for root causes, and creating personalized care plans, I’d be honored to help. Schedule a consultation to begin your pet’s journey toward lifelong health.
