Hello there this is Krista with Episode #188 on the Wag Out Loud pawdcast. Are you a smoker? Well consider this, all pets are at risk of developing breathing problems, as well as eye and skin irritations when they're exposed to smoke and smoke residue. Here's some alarming facts: when burned cigarettes release over 7000 chemicals. dogs that live in a smoking environment are two times more likely to develop lung or nasal cancers and inhaled tobacco smoke particles. They stay trapped in the noses of long nosed dog breeds, like greyhounds or Borzois or Doberman Pinchers, so they have a double risk of nose cancer. and the short and medium-nosed breeds like pugs, Bulldogs beagles, Brittany Spaniels, well, they have a higher risk of lung cancer, because their noses are much shorter, and more chemicals go directly into their lungs. As we all know, cancer can cut years from your dog's life. So maybe consider quitting smoking. Our dogs do so much for us. Do this for yourself and for them.

Welcome to the Wag Out Loud pawdcast, where we are obsessed with bringing you helpful tips on canine health care, nutrition, and overall wellbeing. If you'd like to support the show, check out the amazing online events, products and resources that I personally recommend on the Wag Out Loud website. I'm your host, Krista and I'm super excited to be bringing you yet another tail wagging episode.

Welcome dog lovers to the podcast where we can all learn something new when it comes to caring for our dog's health and wellness. And joining me today is Susie Cyrenne, and she is an expert on homeopathy for dogs, and she's going to be sharing with us the things you've probably never heard before when it comes to homeopathy. So Suzie, I have been looking forward to this interview for quite some time. And I just want to ask you to first introduce yourself and share with us. How did you get into homeopathy for pets?

Oh, that's great. Thank you, Krista for having me. I'm honored. And yes, it's been a while it's been almost a year. So yeah, so my name is Suzie. I've been having this e commerce brand called Zumalka for now 10 years. So we sell homeopathy, homeopathy and natural supplements for pets, cats and dogs. And how I got into this, this business is quite the story. So I started I think dating my husband about 13 years ago. And when we did that, he told me his mom practiced homeopathy, I had no clue what that meant. And so I actually had been on prescription drugs for many years because I had skin issues, and I couldn't find anything to fix them. So I was just really desperate to find a solution. I wanted to try anything, anything new that I could find. And that's when I tried homeopathy for the first time. I tried it for myself. And I got excellent results. I wanted clear skin for my wedding. And I did that and it my step mom made it happen. So So for me, it was it meant a lot because it's not just about finding a natural product, but it's all you know, it's our self esteem, it can mean a lot of things. So I yeah, I was very happy to have found resolution, but not only that, a natural way too. So I follow this protocol for a few months and then cleared up my skin. And I just really realized at that time. Okay, well, first, what's homeopathy learn it really the nice way. And it works. That's what I realized. So. And this question, this question came up, why weren’t there alternative and natural options like this for pets? At the time, if you go back almost like 15 years ago, it's honestly it wasn't something that was very common. So yeah, so eventually, this led to a new and unique line of natural remedies for pets or recipes, that we pretty much serve mostly the US, though we do a little bit of here and there in the world. But that yeah, so that's how Zumalka came to life.

Wow, so you are living proof on homeopathy. And first, I guess before we dig in, what is homeopathy? Can you define that for us?

WHAT IS HOMEOPATHY?

Absolutely. Homeopathy is a type of alternative medicine. And it was actually born in the 19th century. So if you don't remember your history too much, that's at the time when they practiced medicine, and it was very unregulated, very dangerous. So purging blood, blistering were standard practices, and they actually died from the treatments they received most of the time. So it's been a while back now. And at that exact time, there was this German physician whose name was Samuel Hahnemann. Hahnemann, I never know how to pronounce that name is German. But you were very concerned about the medicine being practiced at that time. And so that's when he started doing his own research. And I guess I'm giving a little bit of background on homeopathy as well. Yeah, yeah, it helps. Because homeopathy, I find it's very, it's hard to grasp as a concept when you first hear about it. So hearing the story, I feel helps. So, so yeah, this so this German physician, he actually started doing his own research. And he found a bark called the cinchona bark that was used at the time for malaria. So he tried the bark, even though he didn't have malaria on himself. And after he tried it, he felt sick, like he had malaria. And when he stopped using it, he felt better. So that's when he realized that if something makes a healthy person sick, maybe it can also help it can make a sick person better. So it kind of, it's the other way around, it cancels out. So that's when the principle of homeopathy first came to life. And you'll hear that maybe when you hear homeopathy, you'll heard of a principle call, like cures like. So that means that a substance that causes symptoms in a healthy person or pet is the same thing is capable of healing those same symptoms in a diseased person or pet. So he tried this idea with many other things, got the same results, and that's how homeopathy was born. So that's what it is. It's really this alternative type of medicine that’s made with all kinds of natural products that you can find in nature. And it's highly diluted as well. And, yeah, water has a lot of vibration in it. And it can, honestly, we could go on like this for a long time. But it's really a great type of alternative medicine.

Perfect. Well, thank you for that background. I think that helps us. And I'm really excited, because I don't know the answers that you're going to give us. So why don't we start with the facts that you're going to share? And most likely, most of us won't know all of these facts about homeopathy and how they can benefit our dogs.

FUN FACTS ABOUT HOMEOPATHY

Yeah, absolutely. So it's actually very, like I said, it's about 200 years old homeopathy. But a lot of things we don't know is that it's actually even nowadays widely used. In other countries like India, I think that's probably the number one country, it's used in England, and other European countries, a lot. England, France, countries like that. And even though here in North America, we don't use it a lot. It's not very well known. If we look. And if we look into the statistics from the World Health Organization, they actually, after doing a lot of surveys, and they actually came up with this is that homeopathy is the fastest growing, and second most widely used system of medicine in the world. So yeah, that's crazy. I think that's just amazing. Because we're so in here, we're in our little closed system of, we use a lot of conventional medicine, which has all of its benefits, but we can't I didn't grasp the idea that it was such. First, it's something that exists, and it's really widely used. More than 200 million people actually use homeopathy worldwide. So that's a lot.

That's an awesome fact. I did not know that. Yeah, and what else?

HOMEOPATHIC HOSPITALS?

Um, well, last time, I think we spoke about hospitals, I think, yeah, let's talk about that. So in the late 1800s, again, when homeopathy was quite new, but it really made a difference fast. And I was talking about Europe, India, they still use it today. But we most people don't know is that there were several homeopathic hospitals in the US, in Canada in those days. So several cities in the United States had homeopathic hospitals and the number of homeopathic practitioners. I think at that time, were about like, we would count them in 1000s. So there were actually a lot. And so you had a homeopathic practitioner, they had actually established medical schools, journals. So They were actually dedicated to the practice of advancement of homeopathy. So that's quite surprising, because that's not all we see today. And here's what happened, the popularity of homeopathy in North America started to decline when the conventional institutions came in with all the pharmaceuticals and all all kinds of things like that. So,

Yeah, I think unfortunately, for us, especially now, in our society, we want everything now. Yeah. And that's where the pharmaceuticals even though they're probably in most cases, not addressing the root cause of our issues. They're just a band aid. But we, you know, we think, Oh, it's working, because I can see results immediately. Yeah, versus going down the path of homeopathy, which is so holistic and natural. It's not an overnight, and you're not going to see. So do you want to talk about that? You know, it? It. Goodness comes to those who wait?

CAN’T RUSH HOMEOPATHY

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there are a lot of benefits to using homeopathy and just other other natural alternatives. And yes, I would say most of the time, it will take more time to see results. But sometimes it can be actually very surprising, we can actually get a lot of benefits. But to the ones who are ready to wait, when we think about it, it's it's very safe. I mean, it's non toxic. It's all natural, you, you can't go wrong when you use natural remedies, or homeopathy. And like you said, it aims to treat the whole animal it actually aims to treat the root cause not just the symptoms, which most prescription drugs today will do.