What We’ve Learned in 70+ Years in Veterinary Medicine

0:00 Dr. Ruth Roberts: Welcome to Healing Tails. I'm Dr. Ruth Roberts, here to help you become the best pet parent you can be with simple, natural care that works for real life, real budgets, and real pets. Dr. Judy, I don't know where you've been hiding for the last ten years, staying off social media, but she is truly one of the most recognized voices in integrative veterinary medicine in the country. She has spent 40 years putting her credentials, her clinic, and her reputation behind one simple idea: pets get better outcomes when conventional medicine and natural healing work together, not in opposition. She earned her DVM from the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine in 1984, after graduating from Rutgers with a Bachelor of Science in 1980. She is a certified veterinary acupuncturist, a certified veterinary chiropractic practitioner (CVCP), and a certified veterinary food therapist (CVFT), credentials that took her well beyond a conventional DVM and into the modalities her patients actually needed.

1:30 Dr. Ruth Roberts: Dr. Judy has been recognized for her contributions to integrative veterinary medicine by many organizations, including the International Association of Top Professionals (Top Holistic Veterinarian of the Decade), Inc. 5000's list of America's fastest growing private companies, the 2023 People's Choice Award, the 2022 Game Changer Award, the 2021 IAOTP Empowered Woman of the Year, and the 2019 Pet Age Woman of Influence, among others. She is also the best-selling author of nine books, has written hundreds of online and print magazine articles, and hosts her own Naturally Healthy Pets podcast. She has been featured on Fox News, CBS, PBS, and ABC, and has appeared as a guest on more than 200 radio shows, making her one of the most widely heard integrative vets in the United States.

2:30 Dr. Ruth Roberts: After 36 years in clinical practice, Dr. Morgan retired in 2020 to focus full time on educating pet parents. She serves as Chief Veterinary Medical Officer for Monkey's House Dog Hospice and Senior Sanctuary, a cause close to many of our hearts, and works closely with Cavalier King Charles Spaniel and English Toy Spaniel rescues, helping find, transport, and foster neglected animals. She is a frequent speaker at national, local, and international continuing education events. The reason I wanted to have this conversation is that Dr. Judy and I were trained in the same era, in the same conventional model, and we both ended up building a new clinical practice model for many of the same reasons. She is one of the few people in this profession I can have this conversation with so honestly, because she has truly lived it, and I'm thrilled to have her here. Dr. Judy, welcome, and thank you for taking the time.

3:32 Dr. Judy Morgan: Thank you very much. Happy to be here.

3:36 Dr. Ruth Roberts: You've been making the rounds on some incredibly large podcasts this year, both in the human functional health space and across the pet podcast world. I'm so delighted, because that's exactly how we amplify the message.

3:59 Dr. Judy Morgan: That's really where the year started. I had this vision. I've been spreading the word about natural pet health for over ten years now, about twelve years focused specifically on naturally healthy pets. It all began with writing my first book, and then I realized you actually have to promote something if you want people to know it exists. So that's what got this started. But after twelve years of doing this, with a solid following, I found myself asking why our following wasn't in the millions. Why are there still millions of pet parents dealing with problems who don't know any of this exists?

5:00 Dr. Judy Morgan: That question led me to see the real opportunity: expanding the audience. So many people are changing how they eat, how they live, and looking for a more holistic lifestyle, and some of the biggest podcasts, the ones with millions of listeners, are in the human space. I realized that same audience would want to know they can do things differently for their pets too, that they don't have to accept the chemicals, the over-vaccination, and the highly processed food. So we made it our mission this year. I'm grateful for Krista, who is wonderful at outreach, and my husband and I have been on airplanes almost every week flying somewhere to appear on one of these shows. It's amazing, because it keeps expanding our reach.

6:00 Dr. Judy Morgan: There's a saying that we're all connected within six degrees of separation. If we reach a million people, those million reach six million, and those six million reach thirty-six million. That is how more people learn there is another way to do things. From my perspective, the change our profession desperately needs is going to come from pet parents themselves. I recently read a piece describing a speech given by Robert Malone in Louisiana. In it, he argued that the shift we're seeing around human vaccines, toward fewer vaccines for children and a more natural lifestyle, wasn't driven by the medical or pharmaceutical industries, but by mothers who said their child was fine, then went in for a vaccine, and the next day something had changed.

7:15 Dr. Judy Morgan: It's the mothers and fathers of the world who bring about those changes, and from my perspective, it's the mothers and fathers of the pets we all care for who will drive change in our field, and we've already seen that happen in the pet food industry. I used to have a few hours every morning to just sit and write, spilling my thoughts onto the page. A year later, my husband finally said, if you don't stop working on that book, I'm going to hit send myself. I was using a hybrid publisher, and that was right when Bravecto was first released. I thought, wait, I have to add something about this. So I added a section on isoxazolines, because I already knew they were going to cause problems. My husband's hand was literally hovering over the send button, and I said, okay, fine, let it go.

8:30 Dr. Judy Morgan: So it came out. Looking back at that book now, twelve years later, there are a few things I'd change. It's a great book, part memoir really, full of stories about my own pets and patients, and how my approach evolved from very traditional to holistic. But going back through it, I thought, I really should update this. So I've been working on that this year, along with a hundred other things, so it's been slow going. I want to release a second edition, because there are things in there now that make me cringe a little, like praising a pet food company that has since changed hands and changed for the worse. So now, when I write, I don't name specific brands, because a company you trust today might be sold tomorrow to someone who doesn't do right by pets, and then you're the one who looks bad. I'm updating From Needles to Natural with new stories and a lot more information, and hoping it will be out before the end of the year.

9:45 Dr. Ruth Roberts: That's amazing, and that's exactly it, isn't it? You start with the information in front of you, and then you have to keep updating as you learn more. We're four years into the Holistic Pet Health Coach Certification Program, and my project this year is revamping the entire course, because so much has changed and so much more information is available now. That's part of what keeps us honest with ourselves, looking back and thinking, I can't believe I said that, and then fixing it. It's a strange place to be. Between the two of us, we're well over seventy years of combined experience in veterinary medicine, which feels a little wild to say out loud. But when we started, none of what we do now was even in the syllabus, let alone discussed in veterinary school. I did a senior seminar on herbal medicine for dogs and cats, and my soon-to-be colleagues looked at me like I'd lost my mind.

11:00 Dr. Ruth Roberts: So here we are now, with North Carolina State, Washington State, the University of Tennessee, Cornell, LSU, the University of Florida (which helped spawn Chi University, where we both trained), and six more schools that all have integrative training programs of some kind. Thinking back to your training in the eighties, before specialists existed outside of referral centers at veterinary schools, what do you remember most from those four years of hard work?

11:45 Dr. Judy Morgan: It's really interesting. I started vet school in 1980 at the University of Illinois. Midwest, early eighties, one hundred percent traditional, there weren't any other options. Herbal medicine? Acupuncture? None of that existed for us. My junior medicine paper was actually on the push to allow more women into veterinary medicine, that's how far back we're talking. My class was maybe twenty-five percent women; now it's about ninety-five percent. I think it would be wonderful to bring more men back into the field, especially for rural farm medicine. Let's bring in some of those ranch kids and stop worrying so much about a perfect GPA. Give me someone with a 3.0 who has common sense and a strong work ethic any day.

13:00 Dr. Judy Morgan: What I remember most from junior medicine is how we were taught to treat disease. When we covered kidney disease, it was simply, feed them KD. That was it, a prescription diet, full stop. There was never any discussion of specific foods or the idea that we might need to restrict phosphorus. It was just, here's the formula, follow it, no other options, because Hill's was really the only prescription diet available at the time. And in neurology, it felt like everything got treated with steroids.

14:00 Dr. Ruth Roberts: Exactly. It reminds me of that old Gary Larson cartoon of Dolores going through large-animal vet school, flipping through her textbook with a shotgun in hand, trying to decide between “shoot” and “don't shoot.”

14:15 Dr. Judy Morgan: It really was like that. What bothered me was that we learned the pathology of kidney disease in detail, but never asked why these animals were developing it in the first place. That question never came up, and that's really where root-cause medicine starts. I remember my pathology professor, who was Australian, describing almost every chronic disease as showing up in the “fat, sedentary, middle-aged” patient. At the time, I didn't understand that this was meant to be more than just a description.

15:15 Dr. Ruth Roberts: So how much nutrition education did you actually get, going through all of that?

15:20 Dr. Judy Morgan: Honestly, almost none, outside of being told to feed KD and the handful of other prescription diets available. Animal nutrition was a prerequisite to get into vet school, so I'd taken it at Rutgers. Some students were admitted after only two or three years of undergrad, so anyone without that prerequisite had to take a summer course before their first day of vet school. About a third of our class ended up in that summer session. It was mostly memorizing tables of facts and figures. We were never really taught how to formulate a diet for any species.

16:30 Dr. Judy Morgan: It was livestock and poultry feed information mostly, which ingredients were toxic to cows, that sort of thing, but nothing about formulating diets for small animals. That was the extent of our nutrition training, beyond feeding the prescription diets. Years later, after we'd moved to North Carolina, during COVID, I needed a house-call vet to come euthanize my mother's seventeen-year-old standard schnauzer. The vet who came had trained in Eastern Europe. While she was giving the sedation injection, I mentioned who I was and handed her some of my books, including my first Yin and Yang Nutrition cookbook. I asked her if diet formulation was something she'd learned in vet school, and she said yes, absolutely, that every student learns to formulate diets for every species. After graduation she'd worked for a poultry feed company, then a cattle feed company. She didn't think that was unusual at all. She was surprised that American veterinarians aren't taught this as a matter of course.

18:45 Dr. Ruth Roberts: I remember using the Hill's Handbook of Small Animal Nutrition. We had about eight weeks of nutrition, though most of it was large-animal focused. And the recipes we were given used white bread and corn oil as the carbohydrate source. I remember thinking, what?

19:15 Dr. Judy Morgan: I remember that book. There was a Hill's guide for homemade diets, and you're right, it called for things like processed white bread and corn or canola oil. I've seen a few holistic veterinarians use similar ingredients, and I just can't do it. I wouldn't eat that myself, so I'm not going to feed it to my animals.

19:45 Dr. Ruth Roberts: It really was extraordinary, looking back.

19:50 Dr. Judy Morgan: One good thing about the era we trained in was that, since there weren't referral hospitals everywhere, you learned by the “see one, do one, teach one” method, often with a technician holding the textbook open during surgery, reading out the next step. I'd been out of school about five years (I graduated in '84, had my son in '89, and lost my job for being pregnant, which you could still legally do to someone in 1989). So I started doing relief work, and one of those relief jobs was at an emergency clinic.

21:00 Dr. Judy Morgan: I didn't know the first thing about emergency medicine. On my first shift, the first hit-by-car patient came in and I froze like a deer in headlights. Thankfully I had excellent technicians, one of whom later became a veterinarian and ran her own emergency service. They'd ask, should we place an IV catheter? And I'd say, sure, good idea. I remember the first bloat case that came in at two in the morning; I'd never done that surgery before. The owner told me he planned to sleep on the waiting-room bench and inspect the incision afterward to make sure it had been done correctly, as if you could tell what happened inside from looking at the outside. I ended up calling the practice owner at two a.m. and telling him I'd never done this and needed help.

22:15 Dr. Judy Morgan: He was gracious enough to come in. After that first one, it was, okay, you've done it once, now you're on your own. We had to be brave in practice back then. I did my first kidney removal in the middle of the night at that emergency clinic because the dog was bleeding internally. We didn't have ultrasound yet, just an X-ray showing a belly full of fluid, so I went in and found a ruptured kidney tumor and took it out. Another night, a blocked cat needed a urethrostomy, and someone would just say, go grab the textbook. No new graduate would be asked to do that today, and we didn't have the option of sending patients elsewhere in the middle of the night.

23:15 Dr. Judy Morgan: There usually wasn't another veterinarian in the building, just me and one technician overnight. I follow a wonderful veterinarian on Facebook, Deb Johnson, out of Arizona, who has run a mixed-animal practice for about thirty years. She often writes about how the profession has lost some of its compassion, the sense that the animal comes first. I owned two practices in two of the poorest towns in New Jersey, which surprises people who picture the state as one big northeastern metro area. This was farm country, and most of my clients didn't have much money.

24:30 Dr. Judy Morgan: Clients would come in with a dog blocked by stones and I'd think, I need to do this surgery, I need to solve this. If I referred them elsewhere, they'd be asked for three thousand dollars up front. I could often do it for less, but I still needed some form of payment. Some clients had so little that they'd collect cans along the roadside to redeem for cash. But the animal always came first; I couldn't stand by and watch it suffer. That kind of autonomy doesn't really exist anymore, especially for an associate veterinarian working under today's so-called gold standard of care.

25:30 Dr. Judy Morgan: I saw a post recently from a young veterinarian that frustrated me, and honestly most people who responded felt the same way. She had a full schedule when an emergency walked in: an older dog with vestibular disease, essentially a doggy stroke, rolling and nauseous. She rearranged her whole day to fit the dog in, then walked the owner through a full workup: hospitalization, IV fluids, medications, a fifteen-hundred-dollar estimate.

26:45 Dr. Judy Morgan: The dog had come in with an elderly owner who had mobility issues and a caretaker with them. The client asked only for an anti-nausea injection and chose to take the dog home to monitor. The veterinarian was upset about losing more profitable appointments to accommodate a client who wouldn't follow the full treatment plan. My take was different: this was likely someone on a fixed income, already managing mobility issues and the cost of a caretaker, who clearly loved their dog enough to bring it in at all. Maybe the office visit and the injection were genuinely all they could afford.

28:00 Dr. Judy Morgan: It isn't our place to judge; it's our place to care for the animal in front of us and do what we can. She didn't need to give away fifteen hundred dollars in free services, but a little more compassion for what pet parents are working with would go a long way. Veterinary care has become extraordinarily expensive, and while the standard of care protects our license and shields us from lawsuits, I sometimes wonder whether we are practicing medicine out of fear, or because we truly care about the animals in front of us. That's a bit of a soapbox for me, but it really does upset me.

29:00 Dr. Ruth Roberts: I'm right there with you. Part of it, too, is that we were both trained to always offer plan A, with plan B, C, and D ready to go. I think the profession started treating dogs and cats as luxury items sometime in the late nineties or early 2000s, and things shifted from there. It's heartbreaking. Coaches call me on Mondays and tell me a client was offered a ten-thousand-dollar surgery or euthanasia, nothing in between. It takes real courage for a pet parent to say, just help with the pain, and I'll wait until Monday. That shouldn't be the choice we're giving people.

30:15 Dr. Judy Morgan: Exactly. Deb Johnson's posts run long, she could say the same thing in half the words, but she's spot on about what's happening in our profession. We need to get back to focusing on the animals. Part of the problem is that many of the people teaching in vet schools have never actually been in practice, the same as in human medical schools. Those professors haven't been on the front lines, where there's always a real person attached to the other end of the leash, and they haven't had to navigate that.

31:30 Dr. Judy Morgan: Vet school patients are usually specialty cases, meaning the owners have already exhausted local resources and have deeper pockets, since they're specifically seeking specialty care. It's not the neighbor down the street collecting cans to pay a vet bill. So new graduates aren't given the tools to answer, what do we do if a client simply can't afford all of this? Corporate practices often hand new veterinarians a treatment protocol book: bloody urine comes in, run these diagnostics, follow these steps, in that order.

32:45 Dr. Judy Morgan: If the client can't afford anything on page one, they never get to page two, the treatment itself. Veterinarians are often told, if I can't run diagnostics, I can't know what I'm treating, so I can't offer anything. We used to make an educated best guess.

33:15 Dr. Ruth Roberts: That's the funny part, isn't it. I remember reading a study from around 1990, when I finished vet school, on the human side of medicine, though I think it applies just as well to ours. Researchers compared the diagnoses given to five hundred patients who ultimately died with what autopsies later revealed, at top teaching hospitals. The diagnosis was correct only about fifty percent of the time.

34:00 Dr. Judy Morgan: I believe it.

34:05 Dr. Ruth Roberts: We're making an educated best guess with the diagnostics available, and that's still very much the art of veterinary medicine. The flowcharts and standards of care are wonderful, until an animal falls off that flowchart, and that's where it helps for veterinarians to understand there are other options. So here we both were: you in the emergency clinic, me in rural South Carolina, both trying to figure it out. At what point did you look up and start asking why these animals weren't getting better and staying better? What was one of the first cases that made you stop and think, wait a minute?

35:15 Dr. Judy Morgan: After emergency medicine, I did relief work, and one of the doctors I worked for and I eventually bought a satellite clinic together as partners. He did a lot of orthopedic surgery, cruciate repairs, pinning, that kind of thing, self-taught rather than board-certified, but very good at it. He even performed open-heart surgery on a puppy once, for a family who couldn't afford a university referral. He told them honestly he'd never done it before but would study up and give it his best shot. The puppy did wonderfully.

36:30 Dr. Judy Morgan: He charged them five hundred dollars for what was really a five-thousand-dollar surgery, grateful for the chance to try, and they were grateful their puppy lived. Because he did so much orthopedic work, we received a flyer in the mail (this was back when things still arrived by mail) for a course called Veterinary Orthopedic Manipulation, promising it would help cruciate repairs heal faster and prevent the other knee from rupturing within the year. That sounded appealing, since I was getting interested in rehab, so I signed up. I got to the course late after going to the wrong hotel, and slipped into a seat while the instructor was already teaching.

37:45 Dr. Judy Morgan: About an hour in, I realized this was actually a lecture on chiropractic care, and I wasn't sure I even believed in it. Years earlier, while pregnant and unable to walk because my son was sitting on my sciatic nerve, I'd been carried into a chiropractor's office who specialized in treating pregnant women, and I walked out feeling remarkably better. So even though I wasn't sure I believed in what this instructor was teaching, some part of me remembered that it had worked for me. I stayed. My very first patient the following Monday was a ninety-five-pound German shepherd that had to be carried in from the car, brought in by a ninety-five-year-old man using a cane.

39:00 Dr. Judy Morgan: He told me, I think my dog has arthritis, he can't walk. I asked whether the dog could walk yesterday, and he said yes. The dog was middle-aged and lived outdoors, so the owner had no idea if anything had happened to him. I asked the man, do you have arthritis? He said yes, that's why he used a cane. I asked if he could walk yesterday, and he could. I told him I didn't think arthritis was what was stopping his dog today. Still, being a traditional veterinarian at the time, I gave the dog a steroid injection, prescribed muscle relaxers, and also tried my new chiropractic technique on him.

40:15 Dr. Judy Morgan: I remember fumbling to explain to this gentleman what I was even doing with this little instrument on his dog, half convinced he thought I was a bit of a nut. Afterward, while I was in the pharmacy preparing his medications, I saw the dog trotting down the hallway. I did a double take and asked my technician what she'd done to the dog. She said she hadn't done anything, that I had. I thought, this actually worked. The usual protocol called for follow-up visits every few days for several weeks, but the client didn't have the money for that. I told him to call if the dog stopped walking again. I never heard back. He did fine.

41:30 Dr. Judy Morgan: That case became a turning point for me. I felt genuinely guilty thinking about every disc case, hip problem, and mobility issue I'd treated without this tool. I thought about all the basset hounds and dachshunds in my life who might have benefited. From then on, I used chiropractic technique on nearly every animal that came through the door, adapting it as I went, well beyond how I'd originally been taught, based on how each animal responded. It also opened my eyes to ask, what else is out there that I don't know about? And I started looking into everything.

42:45 Dr. Judy Morgan: Once you let people know you offer something a little different, alternative, holistic, complementary, whatever you want to call it, people come out of the woodwork looking for it. Every client seemed to teach me something. One client arrived with a deck of raindrop crystal therapy cards, which she used almost like muscle testing, to determine whether a proposed therapy was appropriate. I had no idea what she was doing, but if it worked, I was all in.

44:00 Dr. Judy Morgan: I never learned raindrop crystal therapy myself, but clients introduced me to essential oil therapy, light therapy, color therapy, and more. I stayed open-minded: even if I wasn't sure something would work, using color or light therapy certainly wasn't going to hurt anyone, so why not try. My sister, who practices Reiki and craniosacral work, used to come to my clinic about once a month to work on patients. One day she walked in and said the exam room needed grounding, then went outside, found four rocks, and placed one in each corner.

45:15 Dr. Judy Morgan: Those rocks stayed in that room from then on, since it became the space where we did most of our energy work. Dogs and kids alike would pick them up and move them around, and we'd just put them back in their corners. That experience really opened my mind to how much is out there that we simply don't understand yet, and how much more open we should be to it.

46:15 Dr. Ruth Roberts: Amen to that. In my own training in Chinese medicine, I came to realize that I wasn't actually fixing anything myself, I was more of a conduit helping the body find its way back into balance. That's a humbling thing for a doctor to accept, since we tend to see ourselves as the ones doing all the hard work. But whenever I tried to force it, I just wore myself out, while the animal still improved, because I was fighting against the energy rather than working with it. So, you picked up quite a few modalities: acupuncture, herbal medicine. Did you eventually move into functional medicine as well?

47:30 Dr. Judy Morgan: A little bit, though functional medicine is really just holistic medicine by another name: looking at the whole body and asking what's out of balance, whether it's hormones, vitamins, or minerals. I get discouraged reading traditional journal articles that say every cat with kidney disease needs the same protocol, when in Chinese medicine alone we might be looking at yin deficiency, yang deficiency, qi deficiency, or blood deficiency, entirely different presentations. One-size-fits-all medicine doesn't hold up, whether we're talking about vaccine schedules or anything else. Walking into a clinic and being handed a fixed puppy vaccine schedule, with instructions to start over if you miss one, never made sense to me.

48:45 Dr. Judy Morgan: I'm really opposed to one-size-fits-all medicine of any kind, vaccines, medications, treatment plans. We need to move away from rigid algorithms and instead ask, what caused this particular animal to end up here, and how do we reverse it? It's less about treating a symptom, like giving a shot to stop itching, and more about finding what's actually causing the itching. Otherwise the itching returns once the shot wears off, and eventually the shots stop working altogether. The real question is whether we chase symptoms indefinitely, or find and address the underlying cause so the symptom resolves on its own.

50:00 Dr. Ruth Roberts: Exactly, however you get there, reaching the root cause is what actually creates lasting change. Food is foundational for both of us. When did you start incorporating food therapy into your practice?

50:30 Dr. Judy Morgan: That's actually a funny story. My very first acupuncture course was through what's now Chi University, though back then it was still called the Chi Institute, offered at what is now VMX, the largest veterinary conference at the time. The course ran in four parts over a year, with sessions every few months. I signed up for the very first session without doing any of the required reading. I had no idea what yin and yang even meant. Everyone around me was already discussing Chinese medicine concepts, and I spent that entire weekend trying to catch up.

51:45 Dr. Judy Morgan: I remember sitting on the floor practicing on a client's dog that had kidney issues, so we were working through kidney points. Someone in our group asked what the dog was eating, and the owner said her vet had put him on KD. The veterinarian sitting beside me leaned over and said, oh, killer diet, that's what we call it. That comment was the spark that sent me down the path of really examining what goes into pet food, how it's made, and why a prescription diet like KD wasn't actually any different from anything else on the shelf. I had assumed it was something genuinely medical.

53:00 Dr. Judy Morgan: That was a huge eye-opener for me. Once I started digging into pet food, I met Susan Thixton, who knows everything there is to know about what's wrong with commercial pet food. She invited me to my first AAFCO meeting. I didn't know her by sight, walked into a room of five hundred people, and had to text her to find out where she was sitting. Out of those five hundred people, maybe ten of us were consumer advocates. I told myself going in that I'd just sit on my hands and observe.

54:15 Dr. Judy Morgan: I got so upset after the keynote speaker's presentation, essentially claiming that every rendered ingredient in commercial pet food was perfectly fine and causing no harm, that I ran up to the microphone, hands shaking, holding back tears. I said I was likely the only practicing veterinarian in the room, the one seeing pets with painful skin disease and infected ears so bad that families could barely live with them, sometimes asked to euthanize animals because the food they'd been sold was making them so sick. When I sat back down, the room actually laughed. That told me everything about the disconnect between the people regulating pet food and what's actually happening to our animals.

55:30 Dr. Judy Morgan: They aren't on the front lines and don't see what's happening to our pets. From that point on, my focus became, how do we do better? Chi University offers a wonderful Chinese medicine food therapy course, and I dove into studying how food affects the body. It's about far more than switching from ultra-processed food to whole foods, though that alone covers most of the work. Tailoring a diet to the individual animal can make an enormous difference. Before I knew how to formulate my own diets, my office manager got a new beagle puppy she couldn't housetrain. He wouldn't learn any commands, wouldn't sit, wouldn't come, for months, and she was at her wit's end with this bouncy, hyperactive puppy.

56:45 Dr. Judy Morgan: I asked her what she was feeding him, and she said a lamb and rice kibble from the breeder. I told her that a hot, high-energy puppy on a warming food like lamb, in dry kibble, was like throwing fuel on a fire. Once we switched him to something higher moisture and more cooling, within a couple of weeks he was sitting, coming, and housetrained. She couldn't believe she hadn't known to change that sooner. I used my patients, my staff's animals, and my own pets to keep learning how it all worked, and the changes I saw were remarkable. Food really is the foundation of health, so why wouldn't we always start there?

58:00 Dr. Ruth Roberts: That's the big question, isn't it. Why isn't food always the starting point? Why does it end up being the last resort for so many of our colleagues?

58:15 Dr. Judy Morgan: It comes back to our education. Unless a veterinarian takes the initiative to learn otherwise, our colleagues are largely taught that only the major pet food companies, with board-certified nutritionists and heavily processed formulas, are capable of doing it right. I'd argue the opposite. Until we can shift that mindset across the profession, we won't see real change. I'm actually giving a talk at AHVMA, the Holistic Veterinary Medical Association, this year called “How Big Pharma and Big Pet Food Influenced the Veterinary Industry.” Researching it was eye-opening, to put it mildly.

59:00 Dr. Ruth Roberts: I can imagine. Let's talk more about our colleagues. It's frustrating to watch what's happening in veterinary medicine and the limited options many practitioners feel they have. I think a lot of conventionally trained veterinarians are frustrated and scared, and simply don't know what else to do. Do you find that as well?

59:45 Dr. Judy Morgan: I saw a post this morning from a veterinarian at a large corporate hospital with seven doctors and only four support staff, one of whom is a registered technician, and they're hiring three more veterinarians without adding support staff. In my own practice, two doctors worked alongside five registered technicians and a couple of assistants. Ideally, every veterinarian needs a support ratio of at least three or four to one. In corporate medicine, cutting corners on staffing often comes down to answering to private equity and investors expecting twenty to forty percent profit margins, while most privately owned clinics run on an eight to ten percent margin, because we know how essential that support staff really is.

61:00 Dr. Judy Morgan: I'd rather hire four well-trained technicians than one overpriced new graduate veterinarian, because five skilled registered technicians let me see fifty patients a day. Doing everything myself, I might see ten. That's why so many veterinarians today say they can't manage a fifteen-minute appointment. I used to be double and triple booked in fifteen-minute slots because that's how many patients needed care, while still leaving room for same-day emergencies. It was unheard of, when I was in practice, to divert patients to another clinic. After I retired, a client called me at two in the morning, somehow with my home number, saying her dog had hemorrhagic gastroenteritis.

62:15 Dr. Judy Morgan: She told me her dog was bleeding from both ends and that every emergency clinic within three hours was diverting patients and wouldn't see her. She kept calling through the night, and by six a.m. she finally found a clinic three hours away willing to see her dog. When they finally examined him, they told her he was near death, and she said, no kidding, I've been telling people that for six hours. That kind of situation was unheard of in my day. Yes, nights like that were stressful for the whole staff, and for me. But I never went home at the end of one of those nights feeling defeated. I went home thinking, we made it through another one.

63:30 Dr. Judy Morgan: That was tense, that was a good save, look how many we helped tonight, that was the mindset. When you're required to run a full-scale standard-of-care workup on every single patient, you simply can't do that in fifteen minutes. When I did more holistic consultations, new patients got a full hour. I'd have their records sent ahead of time and reviewed before they ever walked in the door, because a proper holistic intake, looking all the way back to their puppy vaccines, their early diet, every change and medication over the years, takes real time.

64:45 Dr. Judy Morgan: Compare that to a routine wellness visit, which can move quickly, provided you have the support staff. If I see debris in the ears during a wellness exam, I hand that off to a technician for cytology. Bloodwork, nail trims, all of it gets delegated to trained staff. There was a larger, high-volume, low-price clinic near us that had plenty of staff but very little training. One of my equine chiropractic clients, working toward a teaching degree and experienced with horses and dogs her whole life, took a receptionist job there for extra income.

66:00 Dr. Judy Morgan: After only two weeks at the front desk, they offered her the head technician position. She turned it down immediately, telling them that if that's how things worked there, it wasn't a place she wanted to be at all. As a pet parent, it's worth asking what training the staff handling your pet actually have. I've seen technicians trained entirely on the job who, after ten or fifteen years, could run circles around college-trained technicians, but that takes time. Someone without proper training shouldn't be performing a cystocentesis, a blood draw, or even a nail trim. Our colleagues deserve well-trained support staff, and too often they don't have it. That's a real loss for the profession.

67:15 Dr. Judy Morgan: It's part of why so many people leave the profession early. There's no way to sustain that pace without real support.

67:30 Dr. Ruth Roberts: Amen. Anyone running a holistic practice had to build that same kind of leveraged system, trained staff handling specific parts of care, whether that's discussing diet changes or placing a catheter. I had a technician whose name tag read “Food Guru” because we sent her to Chi University for the Chinese food therapy course, and she loved pet food. Clients would come in and say they couldn't remember the brand, just that the bag had a picture of a mountain and a wolf on it, and she'd know exactly what they meant and what was in it. She was a genuine food nerd, and it made a real difference.

68:45 Dr. Judy Morgan: One reason I wrote my first Yin and Yang cookbook was that I got tired of designing a new diet from scratch every time I walked into an exam room. It became much easier to hand someone a book and say, use this page, this page, and this page, rotating through them. Necessity really is the mother of invention.

69:00 Dr. Ruth Roberts: You've laid out one of the biggest problems in corporate veterinary medicine beautifully: veterinarians simply don't have the support staff they need. This is where a lot of pet parents land on the idea that vets are only in it for the money, and I don't think that's true at all. They're stuck with twelve to fifteen minute appointments, understaffed, and without the depth of real-world training they need. So how do you coach pet parents to prepare for appointments, to make the most of their time with the veterinarian and help guide the conversation toward the support their pet actually needs?

70:00 Dr. Judy Morgan: We actually have a free veterinary visit checklist available on our website. It runs a few pages, and some veterinarians get frustrated and won't even look at it. It's less about handing it directly to your vet and more a personal checklist, questions like, which vaccines do I want my pet to receive today, and if the answer is none, that's fine, write down none. What diagnostics do I want run today? Do I need an X-ray, an ultrasound, a cardiology referral, or just bloodwork, and if so, which panels? Writing it down ahead of time means you won't forget to ask.

71:15 Dr. Judy Morgan: It also includes space for extra requests, checking the ears if you've noticed a smell, or noting lumps and bumps. We actually have a body map for dogs and cats that I recommend downloading, even if you're not headed to the vet, to record the size, shape, and color of any lumps, then update it every six months so you can track what's new or what's changed. It also has space to mark down what you don't want done, because pets are so often taken to the back for a blood draw, and other things happen while they're there that weren't discussed up front.

72:30 Dr. Judy Morgan: We would never allow this with our children, just handing them off and saying do whatever you think is best, yet it happens with pets constantly. If you're not there for vaccines, say so clearly before they take your pet to the back. If you are there for some vaccines, specify exactly which ones. I'd also recommend spacing vaccines out if your pet needs several. Be explicit, because otherwise you might find they noticed a flea and gave a dose of flea medication without asking first. Say it plainly, up front: do not do this without asking me.

73:45 Dr. Judy Morgan: My own pets see a local veterinarian I like very much, who is quite traditional. When I drop one off for a dental, or recently when one needed an eye removed, I write directly on the admission form: do not give any vaccinations, do not give any flea or tick products, call me if you find fleas or ticks and I'll handle it myself. I'm very specific about what is and isn't allowed, and I come prepared, bringing my own lab work, urine and stool samples, even blood samples I've already spun down myself. Not everyone can do all of that, but if there's specific testing you want, vitamin or mineral panels or otherwise, write it down ahead of time so you don't forget.

75:00 Dr. Judy Morgan: I'm not naturally that organized myself, I tend to fly by the seat of my pants, but when clients bring in a written list of questions along with the supplements they're using, it makes everything easier. I can go down the list and write my answers directly on it as we talk, since a three-page list of questions is easy to forget by the time you get home. I keep a copy for my records and send the client home with theirs. Following up by email tends to get a faster response than repeated phone calls to a busy clinic, which is part of why more veterinarians are relying on text and email now.

76:15 Dr. Judy Morgan: It's simply faster than picking up the phone for every conversation. I used to have my technicians handle callbacks for normal results, bloodwork looks great, stool sample negative, heartworm and Lyme tests clear. When new veterinarians are handling every one of those calls themselves without support staff, some end up working until ten at night. I try not to call clients after nine, since I never know what time they go to bed. Delegating matters, but so does the pet parent walking in as organized as possible.

77:30 Dr. Ruth Roberts: Let's say a pet parent finds themselves told, skin problem, here are antibiotics and steroids, and it isn't working, and they want a second opinion. How do you navigate that while maintaining the relationship, especially if you live somewhere with only one local vet?

78:15 Dr. Judy Morgan: We hear from a lot of people looking for online consultations, and there are quite a few holistic veterinarians who offer them. I take very few myself these days simply because I'm so busy, though I used to do more. We can refer people to about a dozen retired veterinarians who love doing this kind of consulting work. There are also many helpful online groups and health coaches. It really comes down to research: if you have an itchy pet and don't know anything about holistic options, you might see one veterinarian, get the same recommendation repeatedly with no improvement, see another who prescribes something similar, and eventually get referred to a dermatologist, only to receive more of the same.

79:30 Dr. Judy Morgan: One of my clients brought in her little dog wearing boots, a turtleneck, and long sleeves, only its ears and nose visible. I asked why, and she explained that without all of it, the dog would scratch and bite herself raw. Underneath, the little dog had no hair left and was covered in scratch marks, even with all the protective clothing. She'd been seeing a dermatologist for three years, and the dog had been on repeated rounds of prescription medications and antibiotics that whole time. I asked her simply, how's that working out for you? She said they hadn't made any progress in three years and had spent thousands of dollars.

80:45 Dr. Judy Morgan: That's the definition of insanity, doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result. So we started from scratch: a completely novel diet the dog had never eaten, very restrictive at first, slowly weaning off the medications, since that can't happen overnight, and approaching the case from a different direction entirely. That's part of why I've written so many books and why our website has so much information, and why so many holistic veterinarians are doing the same work, encouraging people to ask their veterinarian different questions. If you've been on the same medications for a year with no progress, it's worth asking directly, what else do you have, where else should I look?

82:00 Dr. Judy Morgan: I can nearly guarantee that if you're stuck in one of these repetitive cycles, your veterinarian feels just as frustrated as you do when they see your pet's name come up again, knowing they don't have anything new to offer.

82:15 Dr. Ruth Roberts: Agreed, and this is exactly where a pet health coach can help, guiding pet parents toward better questions to bring to their veterinarian, even at what feels like a dead end. Sometimes showing your vet a bit of research opens up a conversation that leads somewhere new, and might even help them add another tool to their own toolkit. It's frustrating, but here we are. So how do we start shifting the profession, and putting some of the soul back into veterinary medicine? Do you have thoughts on how pet parents can help drive that?

83:30 Dr. Judy Morgan: I think we need to push back against the corporate takeover of veterinary medicine. As pet parents, we should look for independently owned practices whenever possible and support them. My own veterinarian happens to be wonderfully open-minded. When I walked in with five animals and told her I was a retired, holistic veterinarian who doesn't vaccinate and feeds raw, and handed her some of my books, she simply said, that's fine, we can agree to disagree. Her office has advertisements for products I wouldn't personally choose to use, but her staff knows not to bring any of that up with me. One of her technicians even told me, if your referral source is listed as you, we know not to mention any of that. That's really the best outcome you can hope for, agreeing to disagree while respecting that there's more than one way to do this.

84:45 Dr. Ruth Roberts: I think we as pet parents need to support any veterinarian willing to stay a little open-minded. If you find one you like, bring them cupcakes, bagels, flowers, whatever works. I had one client who brought me a small gift every visit; she had the little hairless dog who always wore a tiny suit. Another client stopped by the clinic once a week with apple cider donuts in the fall and pumpkin donuts in season, just to say hello and check on the staff. The whole team loved her for it. If you can find a veterinarian who's willing to at least listen when you say you don't want to use flea and tick chemicals, ask if they'll simply note that in your pet's chart so you don't have to revisit the conversation every time.

86:00 Dr. Judy Morgan: Sometimes that's the most we can hope for. Opening that door a little with traditional veterinarians can genuinely create change. Good luck with a corporate practice, though I did once meet a corporate veterinarian at Chi University who told me her practice let her do acupuncture and largely left her alone to practice the way she wanted. This was about twenty-five years ago, so I can't say whether that still holds true. I won't claim every corporate practice operates that way. My own veterinarian is owned by a small corporation that owns maybe a dozen practices, but she has real autonomy and doesn't answer to them for how she practices. So sometimes you can find that.

87:15 Dr. Judy Morgan: Sometimes within a larger practice, you'll find one veterinarian who thinks differently from the rest and stays open-minded. It's worth asking if you can specifically request that veterinarian at your visits, and hoping they say yes. Of course, in an emergency when that doctor isn't available, at least the practice has your pet's records and knows you prefer working with someone in particular. We have to be our pet's advocate, always, while still trying to stand our ground without turning it into an argument. If pushback continues, it's fine to say kindly, it sounds like we'll have to agree to disagree. I'm confident in my choice, you're confident in yours, so let's leave it there.

88:30 Dr. Judy Morgan: And try to keep it as amicable as possible.

88:45 Dr. Ruth Roberts: Amen to that, because we've lost a fair amount of civility in the world generally. Bringing civility into these conversations goes a long way, especially with support staff, since veterinarians are stressed, but the front-desk team is often taking the brunt of it every single day.

89:15 Dr. Judy Morgan: They really are. Take things for them, and genuinely appreciate them. A good front-desk person can make all the difference, you want to be on friendly terms with whoever answers the phone, so that when you call and say you really need your pet seen, they don't just say the next opening is four weeks out. They'll think, I know they wouldn't call unless it was necessary, let's find a way to get them in. Our staff had their favorite clients who could call about anything, even five minutes before closing to say their dog needed a C-section, and we'd tell them to come right in.

90:30 Dr. Ruth Roberts: Right on. Last question for you: what keeps you motivated to keep doing this work?

90:45 Dr. Judy Morgan: I'm genuinely passionate about it, but more than that, my faith has always been a big part of my life, and it's grown even stronger recently. This is my calling. If you'd asked me back in grade school, high school, college, or even vet school, I never would have imagined ending up here. My faith keeps telling me this is why I'm doing all these podcasts this year, that more people need to hear this message and get on board. My goal is to keep climbing until we get the attention of the people who can actually make change within the industry, on the pharmaceutical and pet food side. That goal has grown exponentially over the past few months.

92:00 Dr. Judy Morgan: That's the first thing I think about every morning: what's on my plate today that will help further the health and well-being of animals, and improve the lives of the people who care for them.

92:15 Dr. Ruth Roberts: Beautiful vision, and we need more of that. Dr. Judy, this has been a wonderful conversation. You can find Dr. Judy at the Naturally Healthy Pets podcast, naturallyhealthypets.com. We also have a little gift for everyone who stayed with us today: if you go to Dr. Judy's website and use the code DrRuth50, you'll receive 50% off her books. There's a huge amount of knowledge, and a lifetime of love and care, packed into every one of them.

93:15 Dr. Judy Morgan: Thank you, and thank you all for joining us.

93:30 Dr. Ruth Roberts: Marvelous conversation. Take good care. Thanks for listening to Healing Tails, where pet parents become healers one tail wag at a time. Want more tools and support? Head to DrRuthRoberts.com. Until next time, trust your gut, question the noise, and keep showing up for your pet.