It's Like A Miracle
Richard E. Soltero, Doctor of Veterinary Medicine
&
Connie M. Stoffels, Doctor of Education
The main reason that I am writing this book is to share with you my life long experiences when dealing with my health issues and the health issues of your companion animals. The biggest problem was that it was going to be very difficult for me to write a book, deal with my health and run a veterinary practice at the same time.
The idea of the book came to me while I was in church but I wasn't sure how I was going to put it all together. Then out of the clear blue sky I receive a note from Connie Stoffels, who is a client of mine, asking me if I would be interested in co-authoring a book with her. It was on the same day that someone gave me the book "The Secret". I enjoyed reading the book and it did put ideas in my head. I retrieved Connie's note and I was hoping that God was answering my prayers because I knew that I wasn't going to get it done by myself. There were too many things coming together at the same time for me to ignore the opportunity. I felt like there was divine intervention and I was not going to ignore it.
Connie was like a dream come true because I looked into how she wrote and I loved it. I have always loved James Harriot's books and I loved the way he allowed you to be part of his story. Connie's presentation was very similar so it made it easy to jump on board and co-author a book with her. She made my job easy. She has taught me that I could write and how enjoyable it is. I spend a portion of every day writing something. It has become a very satisfying and rewarding endevor. It is a very positive emotional way to spend my time and I am positive that it has improved my health. I truely believe that the thoughts in this book which Connie and I have put together will improve your heallth and the health of everyone around you especially your four legged friends.
Every night I come home from work to look at my web page (ask Dr. Rick) to see if someone has a question because I love answering them. It gives me a chance to write which keeps my brain functioning and it allows me to help them with their concerns. It also allows me to see the kind of problems that people are most concerned with.
The book was a major project but I needed it so my clients could understand what they were doing to their pets. I would try to get my point across during an office call but there wasn't enough time. I decided instead of frustrating my clients with long waiting periods and extended office calls, that the book was the only answer. The book allowed me to improve my message and possibly improve my health and the health of the people around me. It would also be a major contributor to the health of my patients.
It is a major project to dispel a hundred year old philosophy of what's healthy and what isn't. We have all been taught that we need to eat the main food groups without any consideration of how it has been raised or what has been sprayed on it. Food is barely considered as a cause of cancer. We live by the age old philosophy that cooked meat is the only way to go. We seem to believe that our dog and cat population live by the same rules we do, ignoring the fact that they are carnivores and we are omnivores.
There is no question that cooking meat makes it safer but it does not make it healthier. It makes it safer for you but it does not necessarily make it safer for your pet. Your cats and dogs are carnivores. They evolved eating raw meat. They exist because it is what made them the healthiest. Dogs are basically scavengers and contaminated meat is a part of their daily diet. Cats are more selective but their natural diet is raw meat. They live in better times where their main diet can be human grade meats from your super market or better yet wild meat obtained through hunting. These meats are not likely to be contaminated and are certainly safe for pets.
Raw meat contains most if not all the vitamins, enzymes, co-enzymes, cofactors and trace minerals with the exception of calcium that your carnivore will ever need. The calcium can be obtained by other sources such as raw bones, milk, yougurt, cheese, etc. The best part is that it is a diet made by God not man. I have found that it cures most of the health problems that your carnivores are dealing with. It has improved my cure rate so much that I actually feel like a real doctor instead of a medical robot.
Their current diets are pressure cooked to the point of sterilization which denatures the protein and eliminates the biologically active vitamins, enzymes and what ever else might have been healthy for your pet. Cooking basically kills most of the good stuff that would have helped keep your pet healthy. This book deals with the issues that you need to be concerned with, and after you read it, I am sure you will do a better job of feeding your pets and more important dealing with your own health issues.
It seems that there is hardly a day goes by that you can't find something in the newspaper about how animals are dying from the added ingredients in pet foods. Today was no exception. I am reading the San Diego Union Tribune dated February 7, 2008, and there it is. The headlines read " 3 Companies Indicted In Pet-Food Case". The article proceeds to tell us that 800 tons of wheat gluten tainted with dangerous melamine was brought into the United States and sold to pet food manufacturers that killed thousands of animals. Pet food makers recalled more than 150 brands of dog and cat food across the nation in 2007.
I was leary of pet food long before this out break occurred. There has been a marked deterioration in animal's state of health in the last 35 years. Cancer has become the #1 killer and there is no close second. Animals used to die of heart or kidney failure but now it’s cancer. A more disturbing fact is that it’s now occurring in the young with ever increasing frequency. We now see young dogs with the kinds of cancer that used to be reserved for the old. Melanoma of the mouth is a perfect example. I diagnosed this cancer in a three year old golden retriever the other day. On the same day, I diagnosed lymphosarcoma on a five year old boxer. The golden retriever will not live another year and the boxer is already dead.
I’ve done extensive research and the only correlation I can come up with is that it is associated with their food. When I came up with this relationship I started to do something that I had not done in a very long time, I started to think. I truly believe that our lack of thinking is one of our major problems and I was no different. It took a life threatening illness to open my eyes. My life and my patients were the greatest benefactors. I now feel like I am walking through life with my eyes open and I can no longer ignore the obvious.
I approach medicine entirely different now. I listen to my clients. I examine their pets. I run what tests I deem necessary and I establish a diagnosis. I always want to know what they feed their pet. I consider conventional treatment to control their symptoms but I always go to their diet for the cure. My cure rate has radically improved. I actually feel like a doctor.
It amazes me how many autoimmune problems, skin conditions, digestive disorders, serious weight problems, hypothyroidism, diabetes and many other common conditions have just disappeared. It seems that when we can’t come up with an answer or treatment, the medical field decides it must be an autoimmune problem. I see it all the time. The reason I know this is that is what they did to me. Since they did not know what was making my bile ducts slowly close down that it may very well be an autoimmune disorder. I used to hate to see these clients come through the front door because I knew I didn’t have an answer. I feel just the opposite now. I can hardly wait for them to come in because I know I have a good shot at having the answer.
A perfect example was a client who came in with a dog named Trixie for a second opinon. Trixie had been going to the doggy dermatologist for 2 1/2 years. She was a terrible mess. Her nose was essentially falling off her face. The dermatologist had diagnosed her with Lupus, which is an autoimmune disease not uncommon to collie type dogs so they call it collie nose. I told her that I wasn’t sure what I could do that the dermatologist had not already done. I indicated to her that I had been working with raw meat diets and I wasn’tsure what it might do for Trixie but I thought she should give it a try. It was expecting a lot but I really didn’t have any other alternatives.
Several months had passed when she came back in for an unrelated problem. I was looking at her dog and telling her how good I thought she looked. She had this funny look on her face and said, "You don’t remember us do you"? I turned away to look at her chart when I suddenly realized whom she was. I turned toward her and said, “ You’ve got to be kidding me. How fast did that go away”? She indicated it was unbelievably fast. As it turned out, it never was an autoimmune problem, it was a deficiency. It turned out that the raw meat had whatever Trixie was deficient in.
It amazes me how many autoimmune conditions have been diagnosed and treated with some immune suppressive drug such as cortisone only to find out later it was something that the animal lacked in their diet. There are many nutrients that can be measured in raw meat but I am sure there are things that you can’t measure. Raw meathas the building blocks to keep a carnivore healthy. If you wanted to improve the health of your pets, why wouldn't you feed them what they're made of: muscle, tendons and bones that are rich in nutrients that support your pet's body. There are obvious reasons why the zoos of the world feed raw and they are not worried about secondary infection or parasitism. These are small problems compared with the alternatives. These problems are treatable but often the alternatives are not.
There are many conditions that respond to cortisone but cortisone does not fix them. Just because cortisone helps a condition does not make it an autoimmune disorder. Cortisone will usually help any condition but it usually doesn’t cure anything and it has many down sides. We need to remember you are what you eat and our immune system is only as healthy as what we eat. The alternatives to a healthy immune system are disease and ultimately cancer.
I truly diagnose cancer on the average of 1 to 4 times a day. I will never forget the day that out of the first five patients I saw, four of them had terminal cancer. That is an eye opener but not unexpected. When I started practicing veterinary medicine in 1972, cancer was one of the least diagnosed conditions. It is now number one and there is no close second. I can see more cancer in one week than I used to see in a whole year. This is not an over statement. There are weeks that it would be an understatement.
The amazing part is that we originally fed a reasonablly good diet to our pets before the advent of commercial pet food. Animals seemed to die of old age or some other condition but not cancer. The animals in the old days survived on what ever they could scavenge from their environment and what ever we fed them from the table. In the country they ate especially well because they got the left overs after a farmer had processed his chickens or beef and it wasn't cooked.
In time we developed vaccines and tried to improve their diet. Vaccination was wonderful because they really worked and the diets seemed to follow suit. It seemed like we had found what our pets really needed and it became a very lucrative business and everyone was happy. The advertisements became common-place telling you how healthy the new diets were and how they had everything in them to keep your pets healthy. We all bought into it, including the veterinary schools. Nobody questioned how healthy the food was until your pet's health started slipping away. Even now, food is not a major consideration when making a diagnosis or considering a treatment.
Thirty-five years later, we are faced with serious problems and wondering how we got there. It was all very subtle and it certainly wasn’t obvious what kind of monster we had created. I don’t fault the food industry or the veterinary profession. We lived in a time when nobody knew any better. I don’t think anyone in particular is at fault but I do think we need to open our eyes and take a lot longer and deeper look at what we are feeding our pets and ourselves. We can no longer plead ignorance. There is too much at risk and we know so much more now than we did then.
This is the main purpose of my book. I would like to open people's eyes and make them think about what they're doing and accomplishing in their every day lives by not paying attention to what they eat and what their most important friends eat. We live in a different world and you can no longer just take someone’s word for it. We need to be proactive. More important, we need to start using our God given brains. Think about how this food is processed, where it came from and what is added to it. YOU LOSE A LOT WHEN YOU COOK IT, ESPECIALLY TO THE POINT OF STERILIZATION.
God bless you and may you and your pet's remaining years be healthy ones!
.
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Shocking News " Keep in mind you are the most important player on your medical team".
Chapter 2: My Younger Years " You can achieve any goal if you put all the effort into it, but never forget what you might be doing to your health along the way".
Chapter 3 My Beginning Years as a Veterinarian "Doctors Prescribe what they have been taught because they really don't have time to get smarter".
Chapter 4: Life shouldn't be all work and no play. "Enjoying life reduces stress and is the major contributor to your overall health".
Chapter 5: Meeting my Wife. " Love contributes so much to our overall well being".
Chapter 6: Pets are not living as long. " An act of kindness is long remembered".
Chapter 7: Turning the Corner". Attitude is the critical part of your overall health".
Chapter 8 Beginning to think and read " If you want good things to happen, have good thoughts and remember you are only limited by your imagination".
Chapter 9 Things aren't always what they seem. "The body works in micro quantities, not mega quantities. What you think is healthy may not be".
Chapter 10 God lends a helping hand. "Miracles do happen".
Chapter 11 Breakthrough at my clinic. "The obvious is not always obvious".
Chapter 12 Feeding raw meat. "You can't improve on what Mother Nature provides".
Chapter 13 Stories of pets on raw meat diets. "If you don't like what you are seeing, change the way you are thinking".
Chapter 14 More discussion of pet diets. "What we feed our pets really does matter".
Chapter 15 Outright frightening facts. "Keep reading and searching for the answers".
Chapter 16 Beware of the experts. "History remains the starting point of all diagnoses".
Chapter 17 With loving memory of Mogie. " We could learn a lot from our four-legged friends".
Chapter18 Lessons from the heart. "You are the master of your own health".
Chapter 19 The miracle "_____________________"
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