Is Natural Pet Care Really “Alternative”? The Original Medicine Story

0:00 Welcome back pet parent. Today we are asking the question, what is alternative? I think this is foundational to everything we're talking about and sometimes really overlooked because we don't have a really good grasp on history and that's intentional. We are not taught things for a reason. I am on a an e-mail list for a sed stack from a man called Sayerji and he has spent most of his life studying what we consider today to be alternative medicine. Not because it's alternative, actually, it's because his father got really sick and the traditional Western medicine was not helping.

0:53 And they found together a long time ago that alternative was always the original. And that's what this piece is called. So I know not everybody is, you know, subscribed to his sub stack. And I've been holding on to this for just a little while wondering what to do with it. And I feel like reading it to you is going to be the most benefit that could come from it. So it's called, they called it alternative. Welcome to the Pet Parenting Reset podcast. If you're new here, my name is Jess and this is a space where we talk about all things health, span and quality of life for your pets and you too. I'm so excited that you're here.

1:41 Let's dive in. Oh, it's called, they called it alternative. It was always the original, from the 1899 Mark Manual to a 1932 pharmacist SNAP. The historical record is unambiguous. Natural medicine was displaced not because it failed, but because it couldn't be owned. Let's begin with a question that should unsettle anyone who has ever been told that natural medicine is alternative. Alternative to what exactly?

2:24 Not to not the medicine of 1899? Not to the medicine of 1932? Not, in fact, to any era of medicine prior to the mid 20th century, when illegal and commercial infrastructure was deliberately built to ensure that the only substances recognized as drugs would be those that could be patented, manufactured at scale, and sold for profit. Before that infrastructure existed. The original medicine was plant medicine, and the documentation proving it is hiding in plain sight the 1899 Merck Manual where it all began. The Merck Manual is the oldest continuously published English language medical textbook and by most measures the best selling medical textbook in the world.

3:24 Its first edition, published in New York in 1899 by George Mark, founder of what would become of $43 billion pharmaceutical empire, was not a catalog of synthetic drugs, it was a compendium of natural ones. The Manual drew from the materia medica tradition the full body of accumulated knowledge about the therapeutic properties of substances used for healing. In 1899, that tradition was still largely intact. The remedies it recommended included arnica, papain, cod liver oil, valerian, camphor, myrrh, and beef tea.

4:08 It recommended dried ovaries of cow for hormonal conditions. It recommended papaya enzyme for digestion. And it recommended cannabis indica extensively for a striking range of conditions. Cannabis indica is listed in the 1899 Merck Manual, and this is a partial list. Hematuria, which is blood in the urine. Bright's disease, which is kidney inflammation, chronic bronchitis, cholera, climateric disorders, coughs, delirium, nocturnal delirium and softening of the brain, paralysis of the bladder from spinal disease. Corns and 52 additional indications. Cannabis appears 62 times in the 1899 mark Manual. Not as curiosity as medicine.

5:02 Prescribed by physicians, dispensed by pharmacists, accepted as standard of care. The manual promised physicians a complete, ready reference book covering the entire eligible materia medica, and that materia medica was overwhelmingly natural. It would not be until 19 O six with the Pure Food and Drug Act that the regulatory scaffolding for pharmaceutical medicine would begin to be erected. In 1899, the age of the patent drug had not yet arrived, and medicine looked entirely different. Amazingly, you can access the entire manual here for free on Gutenberg Press, and I will make sure to link both this article as well as that link to the manual in the show notes for you. The 1932 Pharmacist Map, the last document of a world before the takeover.

6:03 For three more decades after the 1899 manual, natural medicine held its ground. Then, in 1932, the American pharmacy profession published something extraordinary, a large format map of the medicinal plants in common use by pharmacists and the public. Cannabis, Lobellia. Golden Seal. Kaskara echinacea, Dozens of botanicals mapped geographically, distributed publicly under the heading The Service of Pharmacy. Few people realize the extent to which plants and minerals enter into the practice of pharmacy and how vital they are to the maintenance of the public health.

6:48 It has been stated that upwards of 70% of all medicines employed are plant products. That is a quote from the Pharmacist map published in 1932 called The Service of Pharmacy 70%. At the threshold of the synthetic drug era, the pharmacy profession was still formally and publicly affirming that the majority of medicine came from the earth. This was not a fringe position. This was the mainstream consensus, printed and distributed as a public education document. And then within a generation, it was gone. What actually happened and why? The displacement of natural medicine from the center of healthcare was not the result of scientific failure. It was the result of a structural transformation and how medicine was regulated, funded and rewarded. The logic is simple and its consequences have been enormous. A patent gives its holder the exclusive right to profit from an invention for 20 years.

7:51 A natural substance, a plant, a mineral, a food compound cannot by definition be patented in its natural form. Therefore, no pharmaceutical company can recoup the billion dollar investment required to run clinical trials on something any farmer could grow. Therefore, those trials are never funded. Therefore, the evidence base that regulators require for official recognition never accumulates, not because the substance doesn't work, but because the system was built to ensure it would never be proven to work within the terms the system accepts. This is regulatory capture operating at civil civilizational scale, and the 1899 Mark Manual and the 1932 Pharmacist Map are the receipts key data. 63% of all drugs approved since 8/19/81 were derived from or inspired by natural products. Cannabis indica listed as medicine 62 times in the 1899 Mark Manual. 154 of 155 anti cancer drugs developed since the 1940s have natural product origins. Consider that last number carefully. Of the 155 anti cancer drugs developed since the 1940s, only one had absolutely no relationship to a natural chemical compound.

9:22 The Pharmaceutical industry did not abandon nature. It learned to extract nature's intelligence, modify it enough to patent, and then systemically delegitimize the original cannabis. As the most vivid case study, no single plant illustrates the trajectory more starkly than cannabis listed without controversy in the 1899 Mark Manual across 62 indications mapped without controversy as a standard pharmacist's remedy in 1932. Then, within five years of that MAPS publication, the Marijuana Act Tax Act of 1937 began its criminalization.

10:05 Hundreds of thousands of Americans would eventually be incarcerated simply for possessing a plant that was within the lifetime of their grandparents on the pharmacist's shelf. The science did not change. The plant did not change. The politics and economics changed and the law followed. In fact, there has been extraordinary accumulation of peer reviewed research on cannabis and the therapeutic role of cannabinoids in human health, as evidenced by the 1229 studies on our database alone. Dive deeper into that evidentiary body here which is on Green Med Info. The evidence never stopped accumulating. Here is what the natural medicine is alternative narrative most needs you to forget. The research base supporting natural healing is vast, active, and growing.

11:02 It was not abandoned. It was not disproven. It was simply defunded at the clinical trial level while accumulating quietly in the peer reviewed literature for decades. The Green Med Info database now indexes over 1700 natural substances with documented therapeutic properties across more than 3000 health conditions, all drawn from the published peer reviewed scientific literature. The problem is not a lack of evidence. The problem is a system designed to ensure that evidence cannot be converted into official recognition without a patent attached to it. As early as the turn of the 20th century, Merck himself understood that natural medicine was the foundation. What his successors built on top of that foundation, and what they spent a century trying to bury beneath it, is the story of modern medicine.

11:57 Natural medicine is not alternative. It is original. The 1899 Marc manual knew it. The 1932 pharmacist map knew it. The peer reviewed literature knows it. The only entity that has ever insisted otherwise is the one with a financial interest in you not knowing. The research doesn't stop here. What you've read in this piece represents a single thread pulled from a tapestry 20 years in the making. Greenmedinfo.com was built on a simple conviction that the peer reviewed literature contains answers with the mainstream that the mainstream medical system has no financial incentive to amplify. Over 2 decades we have indexed thousands of studies on hundreds of natural compounds, building what is now the world's largest Open Access natural health database used by physicians, researchers and sovereign individuals in every corner of the world.

12:53 When you join Green Med info community, you green full access blah blah blah blah. I'm going to link this Substack post in the show notes for you so that you can look at any of that. I'm not here to promote the membership for Green Med Info. What I really wanted to get across to you today is exactly what was laid out that plants are the original medicine. And it truly is only financial interest that keeps us from knowing that, that that keeps us from from remembering that because the materia medica, the the Mark Manual from 1899 is available to you again, I will have that LinkedIn, the show notes for you.

13:44 It is not that modern medicine created something better. It is that modern medicine wants to profit off of what they're giving us, and they can't do that with plants. With the natural medicine, they can't do it. And I know this is something that we have talked about so many times. The reason why this I think hit me so hard is when I was speaking in February at the Texas Pet Sitters Conference, I had a lady come up to me after I spoke and she said, do you really believe that like real food is actually beneficial for dogs?

14:31 Do we? How do we know that? Where is that anywhere? And my mind was blown not in the fact that she has questions, please ask all the questions you have, but that she is so indoctrinated to whatever it is, whether there is veterinarians telling her, which is just big pet food company telling the veterinarians that they're the only ones that know how to feed these animals. That is just like we have our heads under our rock, heads in, under in the sand. What is that word term?

15:16 I don't know. We have our heads in the sand if we don't at least question. Well of course real food would be better right? Like the idea that a pill is better than a plant that you know, ultra processed food like substances is better than real food. Like where do we get? How have we become so indoctrinated to not even be able to question that? And I'm not saying that that this lady has done anything wrong in her life. She is believing the people that she thinks knows the best to tell her to take care of her animals. I'm questioning what we built as a society. You know, I'm not anti capitalism by any means, but this what the pharmaceutical companies have done, what the big pet food companies have done, what APCO has done is so damaging to us.

16:33 And the idea that we can't even ask a question is absurd to me, which is why I decided that I was just going to read this Substack article to you. I, I really think it gets the point across that, you know, it was less than 100 years ago that we still knew, we still knew that the earth provided and we're, we're coming up on that 100 year mark, but I really hope we can gain some more ground remembering that the earth provides before we hit that 100 year mark.

17:19 And anything I can do to help push that forward, I am so grateful to be able to. So with that, this was a short and sweet episode. I hope it is beneficial to you. I hope you share it with somebody who needs to hear it. And I hope that you walk away knowing that the earth provides and, but we just have to remember that. So with that, I'm going to one say, please check out Wild Wellness Pet. Of course, this is a very, very meticulously selected curated apothecary of items for your pets that there is not a single thing on this website that I would not give my pets that I would not use for my pets.

18:14 And I hope that means something to somebody other than me. Check it out for what is there. If there is something that you wish were there to better round out your shopping experience, send me a message and let me know. The goal eventually is to get it to where it's a we know one stop shop for you because we are unfortunately at a place where we're buying 20 different things from 20 different places and that can be difficult. So please give your pet some extra life from me today and I will talk to you again next week. Before you go, if today's episode got you thinking about what's really going on beneath the surface for your pet, don't forget to check out Wild Wellness pet.com. You'll find the Wild Wellness Bioenergetic Test to help uncover hidden stressors, plus a curated apothecary of holistic remedies to support true root cause healing. Visit wildwellnesspet.com to start building a calmer, more vibrant pet from the inside out.