My Dog Is Better Than Your Dog

Dr. Janet Roark is back for part two, and this is the episode pet parents have been waiting for. The practical one. The one where you actually learn what to do.Dr. Janet has been practicing veterinary medicine for nearly two decades with essential oils as a cornerstone of her work. In this episode, she gets specific. Which oils to avoid and why, how to dilute properly, how to let your pet tell you which oils they actually want, and how to find oils you can actually trust.She also talks about something that stuck with me: the study people always bring up where a cat died from essential oils. Turns out the dose was wildly excessive, and in some cases, the oil was not even toxic to cats, just to cat fleas. That detail never made it into the warning.This conversation is a starting point, not a complete guide. But if you have ever stood in a pet store feeling overwhelmed by essential oils, or wondered if they are even safe to try, this episode gives you a real foundation.KEY INSIGHTS:✨ Tea tree, wintergreen, and birch are the three oils Dr. Janet does not use on dogs or cats. Many pet shampoos still contain tea tree, which concerns her deeply. Safer alternatives like cedarwood and lavender do similar things without the risk.✨ The studies people cite about essential oils harming cats often involve extreme doses or were misread. One widely shared warning about orange oil being toxic to cats was based on a study about cat fleas, not cats.✨ Dilution is the single most important safety step. Two to three drops of essential oil per 100 drops of carrier oil is a good starting point. With cats and small dogs, consider starting at one drop per 100.✨ When you apply oil to a pet's skin, they will lick it, which means they are ingesting it. Factor that in always and dilute accordingly.✨ Self-selection is how you let your pet vote. Let them smell the capped bottle first. If they lean in, lick it, or rub their face on it, that is a yes. If they back away or gag, that is a no. Animals have preferences, and they will tell you.✨ Dr. Janet's everyday favorites: frankincense, copaiba, and turmeric for daily wellness; lavender and cedarwood for calming; vetiver for anxious dogs; spikenard and rose for cats; helichrysum for wounds and emotional trauma; geranium for bleeding; coriander for focus and digestion.✨ Diffusion safety comes down to these basics: open room, three to four drops maximum, and observe your pet for the first five to ten minutes with a new oil. If they try to leave, stop.✨ A GC-MS report is the minimum standard for quality. Look for companies that publish current reports with lot numbers, source their oils directly from farmers, and are transparent about testing. Old reports on a website are a red flag.✨ Never buy essential oils from Amazon, even if you recognize the brand. Third-party sellers cannot guarantee handling or authenticity. Buy directly from the company.✨ Essential oils are not a replacement for conventional care. They work alongside herbs, acupuncture, chiropractic, homeopathy, and even chemotherapy, helping pets recover faster and reducing side effects.✨ Dr. Janet offers a free 17-page safety guide, a membership community of over 2,000 people, monthly webinars, and her Animal Aromatherapy Specialist Certification, the course Dr. Lily completed that changed how she uses essential oils in practice.RESOURCES:Dr. Janet Roark, The Essential Oil VetWebsite: www.essentialoilvet.comInstagram: @essentialoilvetFacebook: facebook.com/eodvmFree 17-Page Safety Guide: available at essentialoilvet.comLinktree: Essential Oil VetFOLLOW:Integrative Pet Wellness Center: https://integrativepet.comInstagram: @integrativepetDr. Lily Chen: @dr.lilychen @the.unicorn.vetSign up to our newsletter to get more holistic pet care tips 🐶🐈‍⬛

Everything You've Been Told About Essential Oils and Pets Is Wrong.If you've ever Googled essential oils and pets, you've been told to stay away. Don't diffuse. Don't apply. And especially not around cats. Dr. Lily was skeptical too, until she took Dr. Janet's course and understood the science.Dr. Janet Roark is known worldwide as the Essential Oil Vet. She is the author of The Essential Oils for Pets guidebook, creator of the Animal Aromatherapy Specialist Certification Program, and has built a global community of pet owners and veterinarians learning to use essential oils safely and effectively. Her own practice has moved from fully conventional to fully integrative to now fully holistic — acupuncture, chiropractic, and essential oils.Her story started with migraines so severe she thought she had a brain tumor. As a veterinarian, she was on multiple medications with side effects that were destroying her gut. A friend handed her an essential oil blend at dinner one night. Her headache disappeared in 15 minutes and stayed gone. That was the moment everything changed.In this episode, Dr. Janet explains why the answer to "are essential oils safe for pets?" is both yes and no, and why quality and purity are the distinction most people miss. She walks through the science of how essential oils actually work in the body, and she shares the story of Louie the Horse — three years of recurring sinusitis, round after round of antibiotics, resolved after one essential oil session.KEY INSIGHTS:✨ The essential oil industry is largely unregulated and dominated by a perfume industry that adds synthetics to make oils smell consistent. This is not what we are talking about when we talk about therapeutic essential oils.✨ Perfume grade oils and therapeutic grade oils are not the same. Brand and purity matter the same way they do with food, herbs, and medicine.✨ Essential oils are lipid soluble, which means they absorb through the skin directly into the bloodstream. They do not need to be digested or processed the way water-soluble herbs do.✨ Because of their molecule size, certain essential oils can cross the blood-brain barrier. This makes them uniquely effective for neurological conditions that are difficult to treat with traditional medicine.✨ Dogs and cats have two olfactory systems — direct and indirect — far more advanced than humans. Aromatherapy works directly on the part of the brain that governs emotion and memory.✨ Essential oils can stop fear cycles and anxiety spirals by activating the vagus nerve and shifting the nervous system toward parasympathetic mode without sedating the brain.✨ Louie the Horse had recurring sinusitis for three years on antibiotics. After two essential oil sessions 12 years ago, it has never returned.✨ Stress leads to inflammation, and inflammation leads to disease. Essential oils address the stress-inflammation connection that drives so much of chronic disease in pets today.✨ Essential oils are an and, not an or. They do not replace surgery or antibiotics when those are necessary. They reduce how often we need to reach for those tools.✨ AI is now generating the same misinformation about essential oil safety that Google produced a decade ago. Educating yourself from veterinary sources matters more than ever.RESOURCES:Dr. Janet Roark: www.essentialoilvet.comInstagram: @essentialoilvetFacebook: Essential Oil Vet - Janet Roark, DVMLinktr.ee: @Essential Oil VetFOLLOW: Integrative Pet Wellness Center: https://integrativepet.comInstagram: @integrativepetDr. Lily Chen: @dr.lilychen @the.unicorn.vetSign up to our newsletter to get more holistic pet care tips 🐶🐈‍⬛

There is a moment almost every pet parent will face and almost nobody is prepared for it. You are sitting with your dog and it hits you. We are getting closer to the end. And then comes the flood. The emotions. The questions you did not know how to ask. The guilt you did not see coming. The decisions that feel impossible because you are making them for someone who cannot tell you what they want.Dr. Jenn Roedig is a licensed veterinarian and the founder of Sage Paws, a virtual practice built entirely around supporting pet parents through their animal's aging, illness, and end of life. She has guided over 500 families through this space. And two months before we recorded this conversation, she lost her own dog Luke unexpectedly the night before Easter to a ruptured splenic mass.She shares that story in this episode. It is raw and it is real.We talk about guilt, probably the most common emotion pet parents carry, and what is actually underneath it. We talk about anticipatory grief, the kind that starts weeks or months before the loss when nobody around you understands why you are already mourning. And we talk about how to know when it is time, and why you will know is not always a good enough answer.Dr. Lily also shares something personal in this one. She lost her heart dog in 2020 and still carries pieces of that ending with her.KEY INSIGHTS:✨ Guilt is probably the most common emotion pet parents experience around end of life and it is almost never talked about openly because pet loss is grief that society does not fully recognize. Guilt loves isolation. It feeds on silence.✨ Naming it is the first step to moving through it. Dr. Jenn calls it naming it to tame it. Once you can see what is underneath the guilt, you start to take your power back.✨ Saying you will know when it is time is not always helpful. It depends on the disease, the pet, the family's values, and what too soon or too late means to each person.✨ Look at good hours, not just good days. A day can be called good but if it only had four good hours and twenty bad ones, that matters. Quality of life is nuanced and individual to every pet and every family.✨ Notice what they stop disliking, not just what they stop liking. Dr. Jenn's dog Luke used to bark at delivery drivers. She knew that if that ever stopped, something was really wrong.✨ Anticipatory grief is real and it is disenfranchised. Nobody around you may understand why you are already grieving a pet that is still alive. You are not alone in that and you do not have to carry it alone.✨ Journaling or voice noting your thoughts for ten minutes a day can help break the spiral. Getting it out of your head and onto paper gives it somewhere to live so it stops consuming you at 3am.✨ The best time to have these conversations is before you need them. Families who plan ahead, even loosely, are more prepared to make meaningful decisions under pressure.✨ Dr. Jenn's sessions are 90 minutes and completely virtual. She works with pet parents anywhere in the world.✨ Vets are not trained for these conversations in vet school. A resource like Sage Paws does not replace the veterinarian. It fills the gap the vet does not have time to fill.RESOURCES:Sage Paws: https://www.sagepaws.com/Instagram: @_sage_pawsSessions: 90 minutes, virtual, available worldwideLinktr.ee: @sagepawsFOLLOW:Integrative Pet Wellness Center: https://integrativepet.com/Instagram: @integrativepetThreads: @integrativepetSign up to our newsletter to get more holistic pet care tips 🐶🐈‍⬛Dr. Lily Chen:Instagram: @dr.lilychen @the.unicorn.vetThreads: @the.unicorn.vetLinkedIn: Lily Chen, DVM, CVA

Your Dog's Tongue Is Trying to Tell You Something w/ Carol BramsonThe next time your dog is lying next to you totally relaxed, look at their tongue. Is it pale pink or a deep angry red? Dry or moist? Purple around the edges? To most of us that is just a tongue. But in a tradition practiced for thousands of years it is your dog communicating with you about what is happening inside their body.Carol Bramson is the founder of Side by Side Pet, a whole food pet nutrition company built on Eastern food therapy. She grew up in a household where food was health, spent years visiting over 3,000 food ingredient suppliers across the US and Europe, and then got her first dog, Wrigley, was handed a bag of kibble, and thought this does not look like food.Wrigley is 11 now and everyone who meets him thinks he is about two.We get into the energetics of food, warming cooling and neutral, why gut health has to come first before food can even do its job, why seizures and hot spots so often trace back to what is in the bowl, and why the answer to changing pet health is collaboration not competition.KEY INSIGHTS:✨ Food has energetic properties understood for thousands of years in Eastern medicine. Warming foods support a body running cold. Cooling foods calm a body running hot. Matching the food to the dog can change everything.✨ The tongue tells you what is happening inside. Side by Side built an AI balance indicator that analyzes a photo of your dog's tongue and recommends which food type their body needs right now.✨ Gut health has to come first. A dog on kibble for years may not have the microorganisms needed to absorb nutrients from whole food. Rebuilding the microbiome before or alongside the transition matters.✨ Dr. Lily tested kibble-fed dogs and found high levels of glyphosate and mycotoxins. A major pet food company told her the levels were within acceptable range for humans. Pets are not small people.✨ Seizures in dogs correlate strongly with toxic load. Dr. Lily has seen seizure frequency decrease significantly when toxins are cleared and diet changes. We reach for drugs before we ask what is driving the problem.✨ Whole food nutrients cannot be replicated by synthetic supplements. The structural combination of fiber, vitamins, and minerals in a whole food is what the body is designed to absorb. Your doctor tells you to eat broccoli, not broccoli powder.✨ Feeding the same food every single day for years is not variety. Rotating proteins and adding fresh toppers even in small amounts builds microbial diversity and signals to the body that it is safe to adapt.✨ The pet food industry changes when consumers change where they spend their money. Even the largest kibble companies are launching fresh food lines because that is where demand is going.✨ Side by Side's Giving Fund provides whole food nutrition to dogs in need with a special focus on service, therapy, and care dogs.✨ There are not enough pets eating well. Every brand, vet, and pet parent working toward that goal is on the same side.RESOURCES:Side by Side Pet: https://www.sidebysidepet.comInstagram: @sidebysidepetFacebook: @sidebysidepetTiktok: @sidebysidepet Available on: sidebysidepet.com, Amazon, Chewy and independent boutique pet storesFOLLOW:Integrative Pet Wellness Center: https://integrativepet.comInstagram: @integrativepetThreads: @integrativepetSign up to our newsletter to get more holistic pet care tips 🐶🐈‍⬛Dr. Lily Chen:Instagram: @dr.lilychen @the.unicorn.vetThreads: @the.unicorn.vetLinkedIn: Lily Chen, DVM, CVA & The Unicorn Vet

This one is for every veterinarian who has ever felt like an island.But it is also for every pet parent who has ever wondered what it actually takes for a vet to practice medicine on their own terms, and why so many of the best ones end up building something from scratch.Dr. Judy Jasek never wanted to own a business. She became an entrepreneur because it was the only way she could practice the medicine she believed in. She bought a conventional practice, stopped doing as many vaccines because she believed they were harming her patients, and watched her revenue plummet. Then she built a full integrative hospital, burned out under the weight of it, sold it, sat through a three year non-compete, and rebuilt from the front room of her house. No debt. No bank loan. Just a mat on the floor and a willingness to see what happened.It thrived.Dr. Lily started the same way. House calls, then 500 square feet, a mat and a desk, no X-ray machine, no surgery suite. The only piece of equipment she needs to plug in today is her ozone machine.This conversation also goes into the loss of empathy in the veterinary profession since COVID, what drove it, and why both Dr. Judy and Dr. Lily believe that healing is an art that is at risk of being lost.KEY INSIGHTS:✨ Most holistic vets become entrepreneurs by necessity, not choice. The only way to practice authentically is often to build something yourself.✨ You do not need a big loan, a big space, or all the equipment. Dr. Judy rebuilt from her front room. Dr. Lily started with house calls and 500 square feet. Both practices thrived.✨ Avoiding debt is one of the most important decisions you can make when starting a practice. When you own debt, you feel trapped. When you own nothing, you are free to practice the way you want.✨ Find the modality that is uniquely yours and go all in on that. You do not have to do everything. Every other clinic is already doing everything. Your niche eliminates your competition.✨ The curbside drop-off era during COVID did profound damage to the veterinarian-client bond. The loss of empathy in the profession since that time is something both Dr. Judy and Dr. Lily are seeing firsthand.✨ Corporate practice appointments run every 10 to 15 minutes. There is not enough time to sit on the floor, listen to the family, explore options, or practice medicine that feels like medicine.✨ Informed consent is how veterinarians are supposed to practice. Explaining the risks, the whys, the regulations, and letting the family make the choice. Not badgering, not enforcing, not checking boxes.✨ Clients follow doctors, not clinics. When you practice from the heart, people are drawn to that energy. The right clients will find you.✨ Healing is an art. Every veterinarian has unique gifts. The world needs those gifts, not another clinic that does the same things as the 10 clinics around it.✨ If you feel like an island in this profession, you are not alone. There are more of us than you think.RESOURCES:Animal Healing Arts: https://ahavet.comInstagram: @judyjasekFacebook: @Animal Healing ArtsSubstack: https://judyjasekdvm.substack.comMembership (free to join): https://ahavet.com/membershipFOLLOW:Integrative Pet Wellness Center: https://integrativepet.comInstagram: @integrativepetThreads: @integrativepetSign up to our newsletter to get more holistic pet care tips 🐶🐈‍⬛Dr. Lily Chen:Instagram: @dr.lilychen @the.unicorn.vetThreads: @the.unicorn.vetLinkedIn: Lily Chen, DVM, CVA & The Unicorn Vet