Natural Supplements (part two)

Natural Supplements (part two)

Last month, we opened the topic of all natural supplements and whether they could play a useful role in the health of our animal companions. You heard a frightening story about babies dying in the emergency room and in their cribs after ingesting a natural teething product that has yet to be removed from store shelves. (It contains belladonna, also known as Deadly Nightshade and described by botanists as extremely poisonous. Yes, their company has unabashedly mixed this infamous murder weapon into an unregulated preparation for infants to take by mouth.) When it comes to the risk of death while taking natural health supplements, no one is in charge. So what makes you think that lesser side effects are going to attract any attention?

Many natural supplements are known to interact with prescription and over-the-counter drugs, producing undesirable effects such as inactivation of a necessary medicine or bringing about an overdose. These interactions don’t tend to make the nightly news, even if they result in major health changes such as inadequate blood clotting. This information will never be on the label or on the receipt you carry home with your vial of pills; you’ll have to seek it out on your own if you want to use an herbal product.

Am I totally against the use of herbal remedies? No, no… I’m just not quite finished tearing them down. Let’s say you’ve established that an herbal product doesn’t interact with a medicine you are already using, and it hasn’t been implicated in any deaths within the last year or two, remembering that the vast majority of available information is drawn from our knowledge of human physiology (which is not the same as a dog or cat). You’ll have to accept the fact that the safe and effective dosage of this compound is not really known, and that herbs grown under differing weather and soil conditions will vary dramatically in their potency. Then I’ll have to point out again that there is next to no oversight when these tablets are being formulated, so that they might be fashioned from the wrong part of the plant; they might not dissolve in the intestine or be biologically available once they do so; they might not be stable in the solution they’ve been mixed with; or… they might not even contain anything but floor sweepings! A 2015 study of several mainstream herbal preparations showed that they contained materials like rice, beans, peas, even houseplants and grass, but not a single trace of the “active ingredient.” A handful of natural products have even been found to contain mercury and lead.

Can we—as consumers and as caretaker of our pets—swallow all that, and still have room for a giant-sized fish oil capsule that needs to be taken six times a day? If you want to use natural supplements, you will have to be meticulous in your research. Next month, some advice on how to safely navigate the perilous world of herbs.

Dr. M. S. Regan