Health Care - Where to start?

The first decision to make in any debate on health care (for yourself or for the animals in your care) is whether  you want to depend on the artificial manipulations of pharmaceuticals to stop the symptoms or whether you want to support the body's ability to heal itself with the tools that nature has supplied.

If you opt for the first, then you will follow the crowd to the doctor's office then to the pharmacy then back to the doctor's office at the next crisis.

If you take the second option, you will start down a path that will not only improve the health of the patient but will leave that patient less susceptible and more resilient into the future.  And for now at least, it will be a much less crowded path than the one to the pharmacy (unfortunately).

But that still leaves our question - where to start? 

Start with the basics and the basis of any natural health care system is nutrition - fresh whole foods (appropriate to the species being fed) and in ample variety to supply the full spectrum of needed nutrients.

What to give and how to give it is determined by the evolutionary trail of the species at hand and how we can fit these evolutionary patterns into the world of domestication.  Certainly cats have different requirements than horses so there is not a "one-size-fit-all" diet, obviously. 

The nuances of diet will require some research on the part of the caregiver but the two hard and fast rules that apply to any species is the use of variety in components and moderation in the use of any single component.  Following these two rules in feeding a species-appropriate whole food diet will make any diet manageable and will allow the diet to self-balance over time.

The problem with this line of thinking is where to actually find fresh, whole, and nutrient dense foods.  That line of questioning then takes us into the world of agricultural production systems (organic or conventional industrial) and food distribution (local consumption  or global distribution).

And that leaves us with topics for another day.