Pippin

Our 8-year old Chiweenie, Pippin, gets so excited when Dr. Walker comes to our house for an appointment. It’s pretty much a 180º difference in her stress level from when we used to take her to see a “western medicine” vet for the first four years of her life.  As a rescue, she had some built-in anxiety that made vet visits fairly unbearable for her. Coupled with some outdated indoctrinated information that our previous vet was working with, it made us dread visits to the clinic too. With Melissa, we all sit on the floor in a familiar place on a soft rug. Pippin gets treats and even lays down, sometimes even dosing off towards the end of our visit.

 

We feel so fortunate to have found Melissa when we did. Pippin was overweight - the first vet told us to feed her only a recommended dog food. This seemed strange to us since it was full of highly processed, crappy ingredients – not at all how our family eats. She exercised, but she was always chunky. Then when we noticed that Pippin seemed to be having trouble seeing clearly at age three, we took her in to see the vet and he confirmed that she had juvenile cataracts. He suggested that we start saving for an eventual cataract surgery after it got bad enough that she couldn’t see at all.  Again, this didn’t make sense to us. Wouldn’t this approach diminish her quality of life to slowly go blind over the ensuing years only to be followed by an expensive invasive surgery? There had to be a different solution to the problem.

 

A chance conversation with a friend whose dog was already mostly blind gave us some hope. She told me that a natural supplement for eye health was making a huge difference for her dog. She gave me Melissa’s contact info and at our first meeting she convinced us that a raw whole food diet would improve Pippin’s overall health along with supporting her overall vitality with some powdered Standard Process supplements. (over the next year or so, Pippin’s weight dropped from 15+ lbs to an appropriate 12 lbs.). She also suggested a holistic multifaceted approach to try to improve or at least halt the damage to Pippin’s eyes from cataracts.  Finally, this made sense to us!

 

We understood that it was a long shot, but we took her advice and started her on daily doses of Oculotrophin (the same supplement our aforementioned friend was using on her dog) and a bilberry tincture (a relative of blueberry that was used in World War II to improve pilots’ night vision). In addition to the supplements she also suggested a twice a month, non-invasive low frequency light therapy. The device delivering the treatment is called LACER, which is a small box that shines 8 different pre-set frequencies of red light onto body tissue. Different frequencies work for healing different tissues in the body – joints, muscles, organs, eyes, etc. The duration for treating each eye is four minutes (two minutes each on two different frequencies). During the eight minutes of treatment Pippin got as many belly scratches as she wanted and a treat when we finished. Now we just had to wait……

 

Melissa checked her eyes after 3 months and was happy to report that the cataracts hadn’t gotten any worse. At 6 months, she was shocked and elated to report that she could see that backs of Pippin’s eyes through the scope – they were improving! After a year, we all did a happy dance because not only could we tell that Pippin’s behavior had changed for the better as far as reacting to visual cues, but the cataracts had been reduced to just a small percentage of space along the bottom of her eyes where they had been the worst.  The treatment was a success!!

 

We maintain the regimen that Dr Walker laid out on her first visit to our house to this day – raw food (the same ingredients as people food!), daily supplements, daily exercise and regular light therapy for Pippin’s eyes. We have a happy healthy dog who has a shiny coat that we don’t have to bathe, she’s trim (we get compliments from friends and strangers), her teeth are AMAZING despite only having two awake cleanings starting at age 6 (the vet and technician who do the awake cleaning insist that she should be the poster child for Darwin’s raw food) and the sky is the limit as far as her quality of life. Why mess with such a successful plan?

 

Melissa is constantly adding knowledge of holistic treatments to her arsenal and travels the world to study with other healers and practitioners. She could probably list 5 different studies or therapies or herbal supplements off the top of her head for any given ailment. She lives to acquire and share the knowledge with her human clients that she has amassed in order to come up with the best treatment for her furry patients. If any of this inspires you or resonates with you in any way, please reach out to Dr Melissa Walker. You won’t be sorry.