Speaker 1: You're listening to Petlifradio dot com.
Speaker 2: Well, good morning to everybody, and welcome on this lovely
Sunday morning here on pet Life Radio, and you are
with doctor Jeff Werber at our new time slot for astevettes.
With doctor Jeff, we are going to be here every
Sunday morning. That's going to be nine o'clock out in
the west by me, and that takes us to noon
for those of you back in the East, and of
course anywhere in the central you can figure it out yourselves.
But we are here every Sunday morning now since this
new time slot. Don't know how many of you had
a chance to listen to us. We've been typically on
on Thursday afternoons. So a little bit about myself again.
My name is doctor Jeff Werber. I am a practicing veterinarian.
Been doing it for this is my Oh my god,
thirty years that's frightening. I went to the University of
California at Davis. Happily to say, at that time when
I was there thirty plus years ago, it was number one.
Now we are number two to Cornell, but we're still
pretty happy. We're always in that top five.
Speaker 3: And believe it or not.
Speaker 2: I still love practicing now thirty years later, just as
much as I did on day one, which is a lot,
a lot of fun. And I sort of got into
the media world of veterinary medicine, oh totally accidentally, got
back in nineteen eighty six a bit disenchanted with the
poor amount of information that was out there publicly for you,
the pet parent and the veterinary community doing a really
lousy job educating. I mean, well, come on, when was
the last time you would see a commercial on TV
back thirty five years ago talking about vaccine er talking about,
you know, stopping pet pregnancies or pet can answer. Now
you would see commercials for smoking and breast self examination
and prostate exams for people, but nothing for pets. So
I decided I was going to see what I can do,
and I went to our parent association, the American Veterinary
Medical Association, and said, you know, it would be great
to have what we call PSAs. PSA's are public service
announcements just on behalf of the industry educating the masses.
I mean, how many times did I have to have
a client coming in with that six month old not
eight week old, six month old puppies say, okay, here,
we're here today, doctor start vaccines. And I'm thinking to myself,
start vaccines to you know, how lucky you are that
your dog is not dead from parva. We're dead from
distemper and they're starting vaccines six months And whose fault
it is it? It was our fault, the veterinary communities fault.
So I got the condescending pat on the shoulder. Sure, son,
we've got to have what. We're taking care of this.
So I waited and waited some more and waited some more,
and nothing was going on. So I started to write
a video. This is you know, think back, this is
nineteen eighty something, this is the time that videos were
just hot. And I decided to write a video and
just basic dog care. And I realized from doing a
little homework that the number one selling books at the
pet stores were these books that was called by TFH Publications.
Speaker 3: That's who made anylibone back then.
Speaker 2: And it was a oh, your Cocker spaniel, your German Shepherd,
your Golden triever.
Speaker 3: You're a laborator, treet.
Speaker 2: I said, you know what, I will make my video
and I will customize it for like the top ten
selling breeds and we'll see how it does. So I
write this video having no clue what's going to happen
to how I'm going to market it, And wouldn't you
know it, this guy comes in my office with a
last name that I recognized. Turns out I knew his
dad growing up, and I asked, oh my god, what's
your dad up to? And he said, oh, we produce
ready for this educational videos for schools and libraries.
Speaker 3: I said, well, do I have a video for you?
Speaker 2: I gave him the script. They said they were going
to do it, and the rest is history. That landed
me on a show called Hour Magazine way back in
eighty six. I became their pet expert. From there, I
went to the Home Show on ABC for five years,
Mike and Maddie and ABC. After that, I started doing
CBS early, so I actually have an Emmy from CBS News,
and of late, I've been working with doctor Oz. I
had been on Rachel Ray a number of times and
mostly news, becoming what we call a pet health reporter.
But I've never stopped practicing because my true love is practice.
And I realized that there are so many times that clients,
pet parents, pet owners would love to ask questions. And
you call your vet, you get them on the line.
Maybe usually not, they make you come in front appointment.
A lot of these questions are really basic but important
that you know. And when I did a local radio
show here in Los Angeles on KBC, I was getting
more phone calls in an hour than some guy who
was on the radio for twenty five years at KBC
was getting in two hours. And that's when I realized.
So Mark Winter from pet Life Radio and I joined up.
We met at a trade show a couple of years ago,
and here we are today for you on pet Life Radio,
the top pet radio station. It's on the internet. It's
an iHeartRadio station, and you can reach us many ways.
You can send me a quick little question to Drjef.
That's doctor Jeff at Petlifradio dot com. You can call
us and it's an easy number. It's free eight seven
seven three eight five eight eight eight two, and we
will be happy to entertain your questions. We are here
sponsored by Pro Sense Pet products by Kong Toys. As
a matter of fact, if you call in a question
or email me a question to doctor Jeff at pet
Life Radio, you can join a conversation here directly, just
go online and click on join in the conversation. But
we will send you out a pro Sense product and
or a cong toy for your pet, so you can't
lose free information, a gift just for calling in and
being part of the Pet Life Radio family. We'd love
to hear from you. And also I want to thank
my big corporate sponsors like Walmart and Target who carry
my full line of pro Sense pet products. And these
are products for you. They are reasonably priced, veterinary quality,
our endorsement. Whether it's a nutritional product, we have the
seal of a board certified nutritionist, whether it's a dermal logic,
we have board certified dermatologists. We really want to bring
you the best we can bring you, but at prices
that hopefully you can afford. So anyway, last week when
we ended the show, we got a call from Diane
who sadly had lost her dog to sarcoma. And it's
a very tough cancer and it was in a leg,
and it was in a leg that that dog had
had surgery before to repair a ligament. And the question
was can irritation, can trauma predispose a dog or anybody
the cancer, and the answer is absolutely yes, it can.
And the reason is that during the irritative phase, whether
it's a foreign object in the joint from the suture material,
whether it's a plate with screws where we get what's
called cycling over time, this continued irritation, this continued trauma
within can actually assuming the gene is there. And we
talked about that last week, that you have to have
that gene present in order to stimulate it. But chronic
irritation definitely can stimulate the gene if it's present. Now,
if the gene's not there, then it can. Let's go
back to the classic example, which is.
Speaker 3: You can relate.
Speaker 2: I'm sure all of us have known someone who had
lung cancer. And how often do we hear stories of
people with lung cancer that never smoked a cigarette in
their lives.
Speaker 3: However, gets lung cancer.
Speaker 2: Well, that's because they had that gene present and was
probably turned on stimulated by secondhand smoke. However, conversely, contrasts
that to the person who smoked backs a day for
their whole life and they're living into their nineties and
never got it, and that's because they just didn't have
that gene so truly the basics that we still believe
of cancer two things. Number one genetics and number two
the body's own immune system. And I have you know
when you stories of cancer treatments that are a bit
on the edge, maybe a little bit more naturopathic homeopathic.
And I've had a number of successes in practice with
bone cancer. Bon't cancer is a killer. Bon't cancer basically
we will tell someone is one hundred percent fatal. However,
I've had a few cases where giving a whole recipe
of naturopathic megados, vitamins, et cetera actually cured two cases.
Speaker 3: I've done it dozens of times, but two actually worked.
Speaker 2: And when I was talking to one of my mentors,
one of my colleagues who after getting her double certification
in internal medicine and oncology from UC Davis, she went
on to get a PhD in comparative oncology from Stanford,
and she basically told me when I shared with her
my success of these two cases, that nothing surprises her anymore.
She said one of the things she took away most
from her PhD is how little we really know about cancer.
But she said, more likely than not, it wasn't that
that my tree mean to actually kill the cancer. What
my treatment did was somehow stimulate the immune system of
these dogs, and their immune system beat the cancer. So,
just as the breakdown of the immune system can help
predispose to cancer, by boosting that immune system, we actually
might be able to help.
Speaker 4: Now.
Speaker 2: One other thing that Diane asked me about in her
phone call, and we didn't have a chance. I wasn't
really that familiar with it is something called prolo therapy.
Now prolotherapy, I think Diane was under the conception and
when her friend's dog had it done with a similar cancer.
Prolotherapy means injecting some sort of inert substance into the
body to create some first some irritation. Then the body
comes in to battle this irritation, and in that battling
will help heal whatever the problem was. It's usually used
for orthopedics, it's for back, it's for joints. And so
what I realized is that doing some homework and talking
to a number of doctors, it is questionable. It's not
accepted by all. It goes back to originally the thirties
and forties, and actually even before that, in Roman times,
they used to use hot needles injected into the joints
of gladiators to help stimulate healing and get them back
into the fighting arenas. And this is probably the same concept.
Let's create some more irritation, get the body to come
in and we do this sometimes, for example, treating certain ulcers,
refractory corneal ulcers, these are erosions of the eyeball, we
will actually irritate the eyeball, do something called keratotomy, either
a punctatekeratotomy or a linear caratotomy, where we actually create
more damage to stimulate more healing, faster healing. So the
concept is not foreign. But what the prolotherapy in the
case we discussed last week was not to beat the cancer.
It was to help strengthen the joint from the cancer. Sadly,
it didn't work, and it's not gonna work. It's not
gonna beat the cancer. But for other reasons it may
not be a bad thing to try. Usually the recommendation
from the medical side is in conjunction with other treatments
it might help. Don't rely on it just by itself.
I think you'll be disappointed. One of the things I
wanted to talk about, and we're going to take a
very very short break because it's that time, and because
of some technical difficulties this morning, we did start a
little bit later than we like to, So we're going
to talk about cars and summer heat when we come
back in just about a minute.
Speaker 3: Live right back.
Speaker 4: We'll be right back right after these messages.
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Speaker 7: Hi. I'm doctor Robin Dancer, at President, the CEO of
American Humane Association, the country's first national humane organization, Here
to tell you about our new show, Be Humane on
pet Life Radio. Each week will be bringing you the
latest news and issues affecting our animal friends, and will
also be bringing you interviews with Hollywood's biggest animal advocates
here to share tales about their pets and what they're
doing to promote a more humane world. Our own highly
experienced staff and friends of the organization will also join
us each week to share what they're up to in
the animal world. I hope you'll stop by until then,
Let's always remember to be.
Speaker 4: Humane Every week on demand only on Petlifradio.
Speaker 1: Dot com.
Speaker 2: Let's talk past it, Let's gone pets at Life.
Speaker 8: Radio, Hetline Radio, petlfradio dot com.
Speaker 2: And welcome back to Ask the Vets with doctor Jeff.
You're here with doctor Jeff Werber here on pet Life Radio.
And after the quick break, I wanted to talk a
little bit about something I see often and that is Look,
it's the weather's getting nicer all over the place. And
I think that's great because we're going to spend a
little bit more time with our dogs outdoors. And this
time outdoors is critical. And we've talked before in the
past about the dos and don'ts have when to exercise. Clearly,
we do not want to do it in the middle
of the day. It's got to be early in the morning,
late into the evening. Certain areas where there's a high humidity,
it can still be in these high seventies, low eighties
late in the evening. So again you need to use
little common sense. But how about the car, And there
are a few things that we need to talk about
when you take you're gonna take your dogs into the car.
And again I am a big advocate. I think it's great.
You have to drive to that great place where you
can have a leash free run at a dog park,
at the beach, wherever it is. I love it and
I encourage it. However, there are some precautions that we
need to take. First of all, dogs in a car
need to be in some sort of restraint harness. There
are a number of good ones out there, harnesses that
click right into your automobile seat belts. You do not
want your dog for many reasons. Your safety and of
course their safety first firstly, and that is just freely
running around the car. All it takes is one swerve,
one sharp slam on the brakes, and your poor guy
is not going to be able to restrain or handle
that quick jerk forward and he or she is heading
right for the dashboard, the windshield, if they're in the
back seat, of the back of the front seat, whatever
it's going to be, and most likely there will be
potential injury. So you need to have them in a
seat belt harness. And they said there's some great ones
out there. Most pets, if not all pet stores, have something.
You can go online and order something that will click
on your dog and then you latch it into the
regular seat belt and they'll be somewhat restrained. The other
issue is, especially with little dogs, a lot of times
they like to jump off the seat and they think
it's so cool to hang around your feet. Buy the
gas pedal, buy the brake pedal while you're driving, and
this too clearly compose the danger because you may not
want to slam on that break when your little guy
is sitting right there on the floor. So and also
that you don't want them on your laps. So there
are so many reasons why they need to be either
in a harness or if they're small enough, in a carrier.
And you should get any kind of good airline approoved
carriers fine. And again you can take the seat belt,
put it through the handle of the carrier, and that
way there will be some more stabilization of the carrier
in the car next up, even though they're in a harness,
which is great. What about the head hanging out the window? Now, yes,
it is adorable and I want to I drive up
and the windows open, I see a dog.
Speaker 3: I want a pett it. I want to say hello
and talk to the dog. But that's just me.
Speaker 2: But what I'm concerned about is that there is something
that we see called exposure carotitis. For some reason, dog's
cornea is to little dust particles, to wind, even to eyelashes.
How many times have you pulled something out of your
seen an eyelash or something in your dog's eye. You
take it out and they don't seem to be bothered
at all. And I think it's just my nature, you know,
because they're dogs, because it's sort of been an evolutionary
thing where they don't have the same hypersensitivity getting that
eyelash or a dust particle in the eye, but the
damage is still there and potentially is created by the dust.
So and that your head, the dog's head is hanging
out of a window of a car going fifty miles
an hour, trust me, we are going to see some changes.
First thing is the wind hitting antsy the eyeball is
going to drive the eyeball. The last two layers of
the seven layer cornea are actually tear film layers, and
those are probably the most protective of all the layers. Well,
when those tier film layers are gone because they're dried
out because the wind hitting those eyeballs at fifty miles
an hour, now they don't have the protection. So we
can often see dogs with what we call exposure carotitis
and inflammation of the cornea is secondary to just the
dust particles, wind et cetera hitting the eyeball.
Speaker 3: At high speed. So I would just caution you.
Speaker 2: The other thing, of course, is the jowls.
Speaker 3: And the slobber.
Speaker 2: And you get a Saint Bernard with his head out
the window and you're not going to be able to
see out of your back window anymore. So you know
your backside, that passenger side window in the back, because
there's going to be slobber all over it.
Speaker 3: So anyway, just keep those things in mind.
Speaker 2: And lastly, I'm going to leave you with this, and
this is probably the most important advice I'm going to
give you with today's session, and that is don't kid
yourselves when even thinking that you're going to leave your
dog in a park car with the window crack in
the shade during the day. It is unacceptable. We did
for when I was doing the Home Show. I mentioned
earlier in the show that I was the resident veterinarian
for ABC's Home Show for many years, and we did
a time lapse test by putting a thermometer in a
car during the summer on a summer day, parked in
the shade with the windows cracked, it took fourteen minutes
to get above one hundred and fourteen degrees fahrenheit. So
can you imagine if there were a dog in there
breathing and panting. Remember if you put your hand in
the front of a panting dog, what's coming out of
that mouth is very, very warm. So that creates the
car already like a sweatbox, into much more of one,
and they can literally overheat. I heard a story very
recently where three dogs were left in a car for
ten minutes. Ten minutes while the owner ran into the bank.
Parked in the shade with the windows cracked, the dogs
were gone. So it is nothing to joke about. Don't
ever think for a second, oh, that will not happen
to me. Trust me, it can happen to you as well.
My advice is clearly take them out with you, do
not leave them in the car. The windows cracked, not cracked.
It's not going to make a difference. You must be very,
very careful when it comes to dogs in park cars
at any time during the summer, parked anywhere, even in
an indoor parking garage, because when it's hot. It's hot anyway,
thanks for joining me. If you want to ask a
question and get a free product, why don't you send
me a quick email to Drjef at petliferadio dot com.
If there is a topic that you'd like to discuss
or hear me talk about and you want to send
in a suggestion, once again, Drgeff at petlife radio dot com,
and again that phone number to reach us anytime or
to join us in conversation. If you want to join us,
just log on to petlife radio dot com and just
click on ask the Bets with Doctor Jeff or write
this number down eight seven seven three eight five eight
eight eight two and we'll be here next week to
join you here on pet Life Radio and have a
great week and safely and give your dogs and cats
a big hugging and kiss for me.
Speaker 3: I'm doctor Jeff Warber. We'll be here next week.
Speaker 4: Let's talk pets every week on demand only on petlive
radio dot com.