Holistic Treatment: Phytotherapy
Humans have been using healing herbs for as long as there have been humans and herbs to heal them. Many of those same natural remedies may be effective in treating your dog for a variety of ailments, if used in the right ways. In fact, animal experts have long observed that sick animals in the wild will actually seek out herbs to help them deal with injuries or illness, so advocates of herbal medicine for pets say they’re simply providing the animals with purer and more powerful versions of what they’d find in the wild all by themselves.
Phytotherapy is a scientifically based, medical practice that uses medical evidence to produce pharmacologically active medicines. Phytotherapy represents one of the most used non-conventional medicines (NCM) in both human and veterinary medicine. It utilizes plants, parts of them such as flowers, leaves, roots, and seeds, and substances extracted from them to treat many different minor diseases. Phytotherapy is also often utilized to support traditional treatment with synthetic drugs.
Medicinal properties of the plants used in Phytotherapy are due to the large amount of active compounds that can be found in the vegetable kingdom. Often, active principles extracted from plants are equivalent to synthetic drugs according to their therapeutic efficacy; for this reason they are utilized in veterinary medicine, mainly as antibacterial, antimycotic, antiparasitic, disinfectants
and immunostimulants.
Phytotherpy products provide solutions to numerous problems:
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Respiratory infections (mycoplasma, pasteurella, etc.)
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Gastrointestinal infections (salmonella, e-coli, etc.)
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Chronic asthmatic respiratory infections
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Coccidiosis
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Intestinal worms
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External parasites
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Fertility
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Liver dysfunction and hepatotoxicity
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Vitamins and trace elements
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Musculo-skeletal development