Preventing & Treating Disease in Your Pets

Additional Info

• Segment Number: 2
• Audio File: wellness_for_life/1522wl5b.mp3
• Featured Speaker: Al Plechner, DVM
• Guest Website: Dr. Plechner
• Guest Bio: AL Plechner, DVM, is a veterinarian with special interests in allergies, autoimmunity and cancer in animals and humans. He has shared his thoughts and research in books, medical journals, his website at drplechner.com, and with physicians that attended his lectures at the Broda Barnes MD Research Foundation. 
  
  Dr. Plechner created the first non-meat pet diets, which included developing the Nature's Recipe pet food line. The veterinary profession and pet food manufacturers followed his lead and began creating similar pet foods.
  
  In 50 years of practice and clinical research, Dr. Plechner’s greatest achievement is his discovery of a hormonal imbalance, originating in the middle layer adrenal cortex, which initiates immune system irregularities that can cause a number of catastrophic diseases including; allergies, autoimmunity, cancer and AIDS, in both animals and humans. This hormonal imbalance is known as Atypical Cortisol Estrogen Imbalance Syndrome (ACEIS) or Plechner’s Syndrome, as the public calls it. He also developed the Plechner Protocol, a hormonal replacement therapy used to correct these deadly imbalances. 
  
  Dr. Plechner was vitally instrumental in ending the use of vacuum chambers for euthanasia. He also conceived and created Stonewood Meadows, a wildlife preserve in the Santa Monica Mountains, which offers governmental agencies an opportunity to heal and relocate captured and injured indigenous wildlife.
  
  Officials of the Santa Monica Animal Shelter call him a "uniquely selfless individual, an animal lover in the truest sense," and he has received public praise from the U.S. Department of the Interior, the L.A. Department of Animal Control, the Elsa Wild Animal Appeal, the Committee for the Preservation of the Tule Elk, and the Society for the Conservation of the Big Horn Sheep.
• Transcription: RadioMD Presents: Wellness for Life Radio | Original Air Date: May 29, 2015
  Host: Susanne Bennett, DC
  Guest: Al Plechner, DVM
  
  You’re listening to RadioMD. She’s a chiropractic, holistic physician, bestselling author, international speaker, entrepreneur and talk show host. She’s Dr. Susanne Bennett. It’s time now for Wellness for Life Radio. Here’s Dr. Susanne.
  
  DR. SUSANNE: We all love our animal friends. How much they give us so much of that unconditional love and how easy it is to take care of them but sometimes we miss the early warning signs that they are sick and sometimes they even are tragically ill with major diseases. Joining me today is celebrity veterinarian, Dr. Alfred Plechner, who has spent over almost 50 years, I should say, researching disease in animals and he is here to share imperative information about how you can detect if your pet is sick and possibly help prevent future debilitating disease. Welcome, Dr. Plechner. Now, let’s start with my favorite topic, allergies. How can we tell that our pets have allergies?
  
  DR. PLECHNER: Allergies can occur in different forms and different impact areas. I think the main thing to do is if you view your animal, you check your animal’s face, ears, eyes, skin, if there’s any rashes, if they’re any out breakings anything like this; if there’s excess itching and scratching--this is all a sign of an allergy. The interesting thing with food, Susanne, what happens is and you see this all the time, you’ll see a dog that has a food sensitivity lick its feet, chews on its paws, shakes his ears, has thickened ears, red inflamed ears and often the skin of the abdomen will be pink. The reason it shows up here, many years ago when I was up at UC Davis, I did a research project on animals and found that mast cells, as you know that contain histamines when they degranulate, they cause inflammation. Guess what they’re concentrated in the feet, the face, ears and the skin of the tummy and so this is where lesions will show up.
  
  DR. SUSANNE: I remember. Yes. Yes, I remember, Al. Remember when my dog Lola, of course, you’ve been my veterinarian for a long time now. When Lola had a vaccine and it was actually the rabies vaccine, she ended up having a full blown just like what you said. She wouldn’t stop itching, her whole face got really red and her belly got really red and it was swollen and, my goodness, I was like, I was like, “Wow. What a huge and fast reaction.”
  
  DR. PLECHNER: Oh yes. Fortunately, as you know I’m one, I’m not in favor of a whole bunch of vaccines and I’m also not in favor of giving a full vaccine to a 200 pound dog and the same amount to a 5 or 10 pound dog. Thankfully, we cut the amount down with her. Otherwise, her reaction would have, could have been more severe. Now, you can get a skin reaction which is kind of secondary or you can get a primary first line reaction which is vomiting and diarrhea. So, it can basically hit both of those areas. So, when you’re looking at your animals, you know you can look at the eyes. You can tell if they’re not feeling well. You can hear it excess bubbly sounds in their tummy. A lot of times they’ll have gas. A lot of times, they’ll look bloated. They just don’t feel well. They don’t want to eat and one of the indications, too, if there’s a problem with the food is believing our animals and knowing they’ve got a sixth sense and they know a lot more sometimes than we think they do or we think we know. They’ll go up to a food that doesn’t agree with them and they’re hungry and they’ll eat a little bit of it and then they’ll back away. Then, they’ll come back and they eat a little bit more and then they’ll back away and many times when you change the food to something that’s maybe more simple, with limited ingredients in it and all of the sudden they woof it down. You know it’s agreeing with them but this is something for people to think about, too. If the pet isn’t crazy about that food, maybe you ought to think about the food and also look, does your dog or cat get gas or does it vomit often? Does it vomit its food? Is it itching its ears, licking its feet? Because, you see, these chronic things that are the effects of being treated, the cause is not. Once you change the foods, all of the sudden you’ve gone to the cause of the allergy and that’s the end of it. Our profession believes anything that occurs literally over the back rear-end--is a flea allergy dermatitis even though often there are no fleas there. Something I found that was really, really interesting with an allergy like that particularly was, say a dog or cat is attractive to fleas, over the years I’ve found if they’re in a nutritional imbalance or they have elevated estrogen, adrenal estrogen, total estrogen, the fleas are attracted to them and I bumped into a neat paper about three months ago which is really interesting. It talked about rabbit fleas and it talked about rabbits when they go into heat and they have their high estrogen production from their ovaries. Guess what? These fleas congregate on the rabbit and procreate. They increase their population. So, there’s a reason why this happens. If you have one dog at home, one cat at home and you’ve got three, four others and one is inundated with fleas, it’s got to tell you that there’s probably a hormone antibody imbalance that can be corrected.
  
  DR. SUSANNE: Wow. That’s very interesting because I know in adults in my practice I’ve found that, when women are higher in estrogen, if they’re taking birth control pills and during those times right before period when the cycle is really high and those estrogen and hormones, they are their weakest, that’s when they can get flu symptoms, they feel tired all the time. They have too much candida overgrowth. I mean, it’s exactly the same for animals. That’s phenomenal.
  
  DR. PLECHNER: Well, you know what’s interesting, too, with things like idiopathic epilepsy, that comes from elevated estrogen and it causes inflammation of the endothelial cells that line the arteries in the body, particularly the cerebral arteries. Many times, with women that are estrogen dominant because of the adrenal estrogen, when they have their period and the ovarian estrogen kicks in, guess what? They have migraines and sometimes epileptic seizures and that’s in the literature but nobody really looks at it, you know?
  
  DR. SUSANNE: Right. That’s the amazing connection that animals, you know, our little pets have very, very similar cycles. We are so much closer to them than we think. You know? There’s actually a condition that’s named after your name, the Plechner syndrome. It’s called ACEIS and can you just give a little brief description of what that is.
  
  DR. PLECHNER: Yes. I had named that the Atypical Cortisol Estrogen Imbalance Syndrome and the public has called it the Plechner syndrome. I didn’t name it, trust me, after myself. What it realizes is that we’re seeing cortisol imbalances like you can’t believe. The fact that the cortisol is there, unless you compare to what it’s doing in the body, you don’t know if it’s active or not. So, what the syndrome measures is the cortisol; it measures total estrogen, which is ovarian or, in the animals, usually there’s no ovaries there anyway; and it measures then the thyroid because if the estrogen’s high, it’s going to bind the receptor sites for the thyroid. Also what it does is, it compares it to the immune system, you’re B cell production of antibodies, IGA, IGM and IGD. What’s not recognized in my field is that your hormones regulate your immune system and any part about doing this syndrome with the four hormones and the three immune cells is that you can find enough hormone in each patient individually to regulate their immune system so they’re normal and once their B cell is normal in its production, the T cell usually follows and when that happens then the candida goes away. I’ve done this with AIDS patients. That’s why it goes from HIV into AIDS. It’s the high estrogen that deregulates the T cell so your T lymphocyte is not protecting them against viruses. I mean, it’s all there it really is. It’s exciting and all they have to do is do a test that they seem to block it, just adding cortisol, total estrogen, CCE 34 and three immunoglobulins, why not add it?
  
  DR. SUSANNE: Can you tell me that lab that’s in Texas that you use? You said that it was the only lab available to do this. What’s the lab called?
  
  DR. PLECHNER: It’s called National Veterinary Diagnostic Services, NVDS and it can be really… and yes, he does a good. He’s actually done…You know, it’s funny he’s been involved with 29,000 of these tests.
  
  DR. SUSANNE: Wow. So, he definitely has a lot of information.
  
  DR. PLECHNER: Well Antek has bought out this A & E Laboratories and they have done 43,000 of my tests and Miles Laboratory, before that, which is human. So, I have been involved with pretty close to 90 to 100,000 of these blood tests.
  
  DR. SUSANNE: Right. You’re definitely the expert in the endocrine issues of animals like that and I know that one of my pets in the past, little Elvis, had that too. Well, goodness, thanks so much for all of this enlightening information. You know everyone to learn more about how to keep your pets healthy go to drplechner.com, drplechner.com. There’s a world of information all about the estrogens, the phytoestrogens, how to take better care of your animals.
  
  Until then this is Dr. Susanne sharing Natural Strategies for ultimate health and wellness right here on RadioMD.
• Length (mins): 10
• Waiver Received: No
• Host: Susanne Bennett, DC