Pets get alternative treatment

Nearly half of all Danes have used alternative medicine, and now puts people also have their pets on the bandwagon. It informs Dagbladenes Bureau.

A search on the Internet gives hits on animal care providers who can heal, telepatere, mixing herbs, speaking animal language, or give cranio-sacral massage, and there is even also trained veterinarians who use flowers medicine or kinesiology. However, there is virtually no evidence of anything of it, said Professor Annemarie Thuri Kristensen from the Department of Small Animal Diseases at Copenhagen University.

"The overarching problem is that there are very few studies in this area. But that do not have to mean that it does not work, and you have to deal with that very many see as an alternative treatment option," she says to Dagbladenes Bureau.

Kæleri or healing

Many of those who offer alternative treatments are not veterinary graduates and therefore moving in a border area in relation to veterinary law. It hits settled that veterinarians are the only ones who have to take other people's animals during treatment. But when it comes to defining what is actual treatment, and what is not, it becomes a little less clear, said veterinarian Anne Rath Petersen of the National Food Authority, which encourages people to use their common sense.

"Consideration is something that you normally seeks out for illness, and so will typically connect it to the vets. If a non-veterinarian claims to treat disease, so I think we must be vigilant," she says.

Religion and trickery

Even people who are considering training to be an alternative animal care provider, should look good for before they invest their savings. The Veterinary Association calls the Communications Børge Jørgensen it trickery if you imagine people into thinking that they can become a kind of alternative veterinary medicine.

"This kind of education is nothing veterinarian professionally in. It's - excuse me - about religion," he says.