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Psychiatric Drugs Impact Veterinary Medicine
by Richard Palmquist, DVM
Chief of Medicine
Centinela Animal Hospital
Inglewood, CA
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Veterinary medicine is
adopting psychiatric drugs at an alarming rate. The field of
behavioral medicine is being medicalized in a manner
paralleling the human psychiatric profession. This is not a
surprise as most veterinary behavioral graduate programs use
psychiatric literature to educate their graduates. The result
is an increasing dependency upon psychotherapeutic modalities
and diagnostic matrices by veterinarians. What is currently a
major problem for people in the mental health field is now
spreading to the veterinary field as veterinarians look to
human psychiatry as a solution for behavioral problems in
animals.
Veterinary behaviorists are developing diagnostic criteria,
which promote the use of psycho-active drugs as agents to
solve behavior problems. The assumption that a behavior has a
medical or biological basis can create a vicious trap for
practitioner and patient alike. Many of these behavioral
problems are real, but the use of agents not properly
researched or approved for these uses is troubling. Since we
know that many psychotropic drugs cause brain injury after
relatively short periods of use, veterinarians need to be
better informed before adopting such treatments. The current
trend of human medical practitioners that are adopting non
drug treatments for their patients is encouraging and proper
documentation of successful methods will assist humans and
pets alike.
As an integrative veterinarian of twenty years experience, I
do not use psychotropic drugs as therapy. While it is true
that some cases have elusive causes, it is generally
worthwhile to pursue these causes and then administer
effective treatment to resolve the condition. Veterinarians
face similar challenges to the human mental health field and
there is much that we can learn from one another. For
instance, pets that suddenly display abnormal behaviors should
have a complete medical evaluation including physical
examination, blood pressure, urinalysis, complete blood count,
serum chemistries and thyroid testing. Finding and treating
the correct medical cause can solve many behavioral problems.
In this regard, veterinary behaviorists are doing an excellent
job.
Difficulty arises when no specific cause for the abnormal
behavior can be located. There is a tendency to attach an
agreed-upon label and then prescribe a drug to solve the
problem. This happens for many reasons. There is a genuine
desire to help these pets and their owners and drugs promise a
quick fix. Veterinarians are trained to prescribe a pill for a
problem and once a behavior has a medical name established
then it becomes nearly habitual to prescribe whatever
medication is currently trendy. One example of this is the
condition known as "separation anxiety."
Dogs that become overly upset and demonstrate annoying
behaviors such as destruction of property or excessive
vocalization when left alone are labeled as suffering from
separation anxiety. We state that dogs suffer from separation
anxiety, when usually the biggest suffering is on the part of
the owner. If we consider that dogs are social animals and
that instinct dictates that being left alone is akin to being
left as a meal for a wandering predator, then we see that this
disorder is actually based upon very survival oriented
behavior. What these dogs need is correct training so that
they come to understand that they are safe. Studies show that
training helps the majority of these pets and that use of a
psychiatric drug causes diarrhea and only shortens the problem
by a short time over training. We have no studies on the
long-term use of these medications, but veterinarians are
prescribing them in large amounts, and they are very
profitable to sell. Are we damaging brain elements? Do
individual dogs treated have increased risks for allergies or
cancer? We simply don't know.
Scientific method originated largely in an effort to document
fact in the physical universe and to establish a procedure to
find and communicate phenomena, which when properly evaluated
and understood could lead to better understanding and control
of our environment. To this end, the medical arts adopted the
scientific method and the result has been improved medical
technology and patient survival.
Modern psychiatric therapy has been progressively medicalized.
Scientific method is sadly missing. Often conditions are named
merely to describe a set of findings with no real pathology
documented. Once a name exists, it becomes easier to attach a
therapy to the name. If the name is based upon a correct
assessment and accurate understanding of the condition, then
that therapy can be found to be truly useful. Sadly, in
biologic based mental health there are so few truly effective
therapies that we can become desperate to find a treatment
before we really understand the condition.
Prescribing psychiatric drugs for mental disorders becomes a
stimulus-response activity and the result is devastating.
Practitioners who routinely use nutritional means, allergy
testing and other modalities see many patients suddenly
recover from illnesses that have only descriptive diagnoses
before. A delusional patient recovers when his thyroid is
properly diagnosed and treated. His actual working diagnosis
is hypothyroidism, and while delusional psychotic may be
descriptively accurate, the psychopharmaceutical agent given
is often times extremely destructive, and may cause even more
pathology to occur. Integrative and holistic practitioners
frequently see these problems and are very concerned with the
efforts to medicalize behaviors and to present drugs as
solutions for many of these disorders. Hopefully, in the
future behavioral problems will be better handled through the
work of such groups as Safe Harbor.
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