‘A very different kind of practice’

SUE Armstrong qualified from Cambridge in 1984 and started training in homoeopathy in 1992. She owns and runs Balanced Being Veterinary Centre at Wetherby, West Yorkshire. JA. What triggered your interest in homoeopathy? SA. I had been in practice for several years and had started to study towards a certificate in veterinary dermatology. Several things happened at the same time. I became particularly concerned that I was learning many names for skin diseases but the actual treatment options were, in my opinion, minimal. Basically, most treatment regardless of the disease came down to antibiotics, steroids, or a combination of those two, with only a small number of diseases that would have specific, tailored treatments for them. In the majority, you were learning to identify and name diseases and yet you had incredibly limited treatment options for them. I was also very cognisant that you were controlling diseases, not curing them. For example, with issues like atopy there was no cure, you were just giving steroids for life and it is little different now. At the same time I was very aware that I was listening to clients who were giving me specific bits of information that I could do nothing with, e.g. “My dog is coughing at 3am.” There is nothing on my shelf for dogs that cough at 3am! Why do people come in with specific little nuggets of information? For example, one dog might have arthritis worse on a cold damp day and the next dog comes in and the arthritis is worse on a dry, sunny, day. All conventional treatments for arthritis are just treatments for arthritis and do not take any account of these differences. So I became very interested in why there were such specific differences in symptom presentation and I started looking outside the box, at other treatment modalities that were out there. Then, like so many other homoeopaths, I was suffering from some personal health problems. I had a severe cartilage problem with a knee which kept locking out and inflaming 2- 3 times a week. My then boss was already a veterinary homoeopath and he asked if I would consider trying anything that he had to offer. I was told by the conventional world that I would need a knee replacement but it could not be before I was 50 and I was advised to take nonsteroidals until then – and I was in my 20s. I had nothing to lose. I instinctively knew I didn’t want to take nonsteroidals for 30 years, so I took a prescribed homoeopathic remedy and that’s what started me on the homoeopathy route. It was nine months before the next lock-out on my knee and for me that was phenomenal. I have only needed treatment for this condition twice since. JA. And now you lecture all over the world. SA. I do. Primarily I am a partner in the Homoeopathic Professionals Teaching Group (HPTG) running courses accredited by the Faculty of Homeopathy. I trained initially at The Royal London Homoeopathic Hospital and then the HPTG doing a total of three years foundation training in veterinary homoeopathy, then went on to a teacher training programme and became a lecturer and subsequently a partner in 1996. I have been teaching with them ever since. I also teach under my own name and do a lot of conference master classes around the world. JA. Have you ever presented in a hostile environment? SA. Yes! Sadly I have ended up spending most of my time dealing with conflict simply because I choose to practise homoeopathy.I do not choose to teach in a hostile environment but I accept that my career path has ended up with me being a representative for veterinary homoeopathy which means I have to deal regularly with some members of my own profession who are incredibly aggressive when it comes to this subject. JA. How many members are there in the BAHVS? SA. There are just under 100 members in the UK but we are also affiliated to the International Association of Veterinary Homeopaths IAVH. There are many thousands of veterinary homoeopaths around the world, many of whom have been taught by us here in the UK. We are one of the biggest teaching groups world-wide and the Faculty of Homeopathy qualifications are recognised in large parts of the world. JA. Are you kept busy? SA. Yes, very busy indeed. I spend a lot of my time treating cancer patients, for whom I have a passion. I also love the equine world and spend a fair proportion of time dealing with flat racehorses, as well as teaching, running my own small animal practice, and also trying to promote homoeopathy to the general public and the veterinary profession and setting up research programmes with the Faculty and its research committee. JA. You also carry out acupuncture. Are you offended by the word “alternative”? SA. I prefer “complementary” as “alternative” seems to suggest it is “either/or”. My practice is set up as an integrative veterinary centre so I will choose for my patients whatever combination of treatment options that will prove to be the safest and most efficacious for the individual patient. For me, acupuncture has a particular place for such things as musculoskeletal disease which is where I personally use it the most although TCM is a complete system of medicine in its own right. I also do low level laser therapy both as a tool for acupuncture because it’s painless but also for wound healing and tendon healing. JA. How many of your clients come here to see you as an ordinary vet and how many come here because you are a bit different? SA. This is a very different kind of practice, full stop. We do first opinion work but the emphasis is shifting towards a referral centre because I am now getting very well-known for cancer work and for the fact that I offer homoeopathy and acupuncture. I get a lot of self-referred clients and we need to help them to approach their own conventional veterinary surgeons for referral. We approach all the vets and we won’t take any cases on if we haven’t received the conventional veterinary histories and sought permission in the correct manner. We currently have 40% of clients who are first opinion. I called this practice “Balanced Being” which is a little provocative as I wanted people to know at the start that this was not an ordinary veterinary centre doing ordinary medicine. I could count on the fingers of one hand the number of people who walk in here expecting this to be an ordinary veterinary practice that just does conventional medicine. But if they do it’s not a problem. Some clients say they don’t want “that homoeopathy stuff ” but that is not an issue. I discuss the options with my clients and do not bully anybody into anything. If somebody comes here, for example, saying they only want steroids for an atopy case I will probably explain to them that they are at the wrong veterinary surgeon and I will refer them somewhere else if that’s what they want. I have more effective and safer treatments than that. I have better results using other things so why would I give an animal steroids or other immunosuppressants if I do not have to? I am not against steroids by the way: they have a place, but they are overused. If I have a safer treatment option that can take an animal to a place of cure rather than palliation, I would want to use that. JA. Are people more aware these days of the world of complementary medicine and care? SA. Aware yes; knowledgeable no. Some homoeopathic remedies are sold in chemists saying, for example, “Remedy for a cough”, but if you use homoeopathy products in this way you won’t get good results. The people who are “aware” but with a closed mind are the most dangerous and unpleasant of all because they are the attack merchants. These people really grind you down when you are coming in to work just trying to do a good job for your clients and patients and you are getting attacked by other professionals every single day of your working life. I studied to become a veterinary surgeon in exactly the same way as they did. I run a small business in exactly the same way that they do. I employ staff. I look after my patients. I have bills to pay just as they do yet they seem to have the right to attack me because I choose to do something slightly different to what they do when very often they are entirely ignorant of what it’s about. JA. Has it helped that there are now more women in practice? SA. Most of the world’s leading homoeopaths are currently men so I don’t think a female student bias makes a big difference! There is a difficulty with a lot of females not wanting to stay in the profession full-time, so with homoeopathy, whilst the “compassion” side of it can attract females perhaps more than the more macho males, the additional three years of foundation training and the years after that having to really learn your craft takes a lot of commitment. So for those wanting to work just a couple of days a week in practice, you just don’t get the committed people who are able to give what is needed to take on not only conventional medicine plus a whole other way of thinking on top of it. In addition, many bosses are not prepared to finance homoeopathy study so people have to finance it out of their own income. It isn’t about gender as such; it’s more about the fact that a person has to be a committed member of the profession. Veterinary homoeopaths are often accused of being in it for the money but if you go into homoeopathy to earn money, forget it! You cannot turn patients around in five and 10 minute appointments when you do homoeopathy. The actual profit per client is less than it would ever be if you were doing conventional consultations, not least because you are selling a lot less of other products. JA. Has it ever not worked? SA. Sure! If it worked in every case then everybody would be doing it. There are cases when nothing works, no matter what you do. This is why I am passionate about integrated medicine and not just homoeopathy. It’s not about babies and bathwater, which is again something we get levelled at us in the debate about homoeopathy versus conventional medicines, which is nonsense. The way I do medicine is totally integrated: the best medicine for individual animals – so I am all the time reappraising what the animal needs at this point in time for its disease process. If homoeopathy for an animal is not working and I’m not getting the response, it’s time to consider a different approach so that is the time when a drug may come in and vice versa. You need to be able to diagnose what is going wrong and give clients the best advice on all that is out there. I get owners who come in and say they only want their animal to have homoeopathy and no drugs anywhere near it; but if the animal is in pain and needs a painkiller I will be just as harsh with them and tell them the facts of life. The same goes for vaccination. I had one client who wanted to tear me apart because I gave her very clear reasons why her healthy puppy should have an initial vaccination. This woman was mortified that I as a homoeopath could possibly give her that advice. I explained to her that I am first and foremost a veterinary surgeon but even as homoeopath I still believe, based on the balance of all the knowledge we have today, that an initial vaccination for a healthy animal is very important. JA. Veterinary homoeopathy is not recognised by the Royal College. Do you wish it was? SA. We are all the time knocking on their door. The current negative answer is partly due to the low number of qualified veterinary homoeopaths but it also comes down to issues around evidence-based medicine and the studies claiming to refute any evidence for homoeopathy – but the evidence is there. If you look at individual trials you will see there is plenty of evidence to say it does work with extremely positive results. Around the world there have been thousands of trials that give positive evidence for homoeopathy – not necessarily veterinary homoeopathy but homoeopathy. I don’t want to be a researcher, I am a clinician but people like me are going to have to do clinical research in practice. We are currently trying to set these up with the research committee with the Faculty of Veterinary Homeopathy. We are going to have to do it on a multi-centre basis so that we can get statistically significant trial sizes. But it is going to take time. Funding is a massive problem because there is no single drug that can come out of this that you can sell and because homoeopathy is an individualised medicine you can’t say there is going to be this one drug that is going to treat, say, arthritis in all cases. There is no product to sell. Most clinical trials are based on the idea of bringing a product to the market to make a profit. We have a philosophy to bring to the market because we individualise our medicine. JA. If you were a regulator or a legislator, what would you really like to see changed? SA. I would like to see the law enforced and the veterinary homoeopathic qualification accepted and standardised. Nobody enforces the law when lay homoeopaths are treating animals. I would like to see people sharing knowledge for the betterment of health and the understanding of disease instead of taking stances on one side or the other and fighting each other. It’s unproductive. We need to ensure that veterinary surgeons wanting to practise homoeopathy attend recognised courses and are properly trained; that they sit the good professional exams, undertake CPD and are governed as they currently are by the Faculty of Homeopathy. It would be so much better for the veterinary profession as a whole if homoeopathy was recognised as a speciality. JA. What is the single most important point about homoeopathy you would like to get across? SA. The one thing that homoeopathy does better than anything else in my opinion is to treat chronic ill-health in an individual patient. Chronic ill health requiring permanent medication is the epidemic of our time and homoeopathy understands it and treats it better than any other modality I know.