Dr. Richard Palmquist is the Chief of Integrative Health Services at Centinela Animal Hospital, Inglewood California. In this Huffington Post article he speaks movingly of his discovery of and dawning belief in integrative medicine, which encompasses not only conventional therapies but also alternative and complementary medicine (CAM).
As a veterinary doctor Dr Palmquist would try everything possible to save and treat his non human patients and for a long time believed that he was “doing all that could be done”.
However his encounter with a veterinarian who used alternative therapies for a golden retriever patient of his with lymphatic cancer; whom he had himself given up on, changed his beliefs and his practices.
Expecting to find a ‘quack’ Dr Palmquist found someone who sought only to support individual immune systems, to help patients so that “sometimes remarkable things happen”! He found dietary therapy to reduce the size of a cat’s brain tumor to half its size, and found acupressure to cure migraine.
There was an oral tumor that was recovering with the use of cryosurgery, and a paralyzed German Shepherd cured by using acupuncture.
It was then that Dr Palmquist started to view healing in a whole other way; was inspired to write his authoritative 1000 page text book for vets, Integrating Complementary Medicine into Veterinary Practice.
His life and his medicine changed; he now works to help his patients “live their lives at the highest level of survival possible!”