If there's one thing both Dr. Lynda Loudon and I agree on, it's that the best medicine isn't just what you can measure, diagnose and prescribe.
It's about staying present, going with our intuition and taking the route of least regret.
In this inspiring conversation, I sat down with an ER veterinarian, Dog Mom Society Founder, and Animal Advocate Dr. Lynda Loudon to talk about the lessons we've learned (often the hard way!) through decades of practice, the mistakes we all make, and how to find our way to a more holistic, heart-centred path.
Index
The Power of Intuition in Veterinary Work
ER Medicine: Demands, Drug Use & Overmedication
Nutrition & The Gut Microbiome
Insights on Gastric Dilatation Volvulus (Bloat)
Community: Teaching and Advocacy for Pet Guardians
Key Takeaways
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- Proper nutrition and gut health are foundational for preventive care.
- Why dog lovers should trust their intuition and advocate for their pets.
- Overvaccination and hormonal health of spayed and neutered dogs.
- The end-of-life care.
The Power of Intuition in Veterinary Work
Dr. Dobias:
You mention being intuitive as a child—was that something you kept with you through vet school?
Dr. Loudon:
I actually lost touch with that. Vet school is all about textbooks and protocols, and I think I forgot how to listen to my intuition. For the first few years in practice, I was just trying to be the best “critical care doc” and left any idea of “energy healing” behind.
Dr. Dobias:
But something brought it back for you?
Dr. Loudon:
Completely. I’ll never forget this one cat—a five-year-old in renal failure, whose owner was desperate, saying she couldn’t lose him. We’d tried everything medically, but nothing worked. That night, alone in the hospital, I did something I hadn’t done since I was a child: I just held him and focused all my energy on his kidneys, like I used to do with wounded birds. It’s embarrassing—at the time I didn’t tell anyone, not even my husband (also a vet) for years. But the next morning, his kidney values were completely normal.
Dr. Dobias:
That’s incredible, and I know exactly what you mean. I’ve had a few cases—like with homeopathics for hyperthyroid cats—where the results were completely outside the expected. Sometimes, maybe healing is just meant to be unique and unrepeatable. Sometimes it feels like “playing music out of your heart.” There’s a knowing that just doesn’t fit in any textbook.
ER Medicine: Demands, Drug Use & Overmedication
Dr. Dobias:
Lynda, you spent decades in emergency medicine. How did that environment shape your view of drugs and treatment? Did you always feel that conventional ER was the pinnacle of veterinary knowledge, or did that change for you?
Dr. Loudon:
It's funny, Peter. For a long time, ER felt just right for me. I never felt really stressed there—if anything, the adrenaline and constant change were my comfort zone. But looking back, I also saw so much overmedication. Some drugs—like lidocaine for arrhythmias or norepinephrine for blood pressure—absolutely save lives in crisis. I wouldn't want to practice emergency medicine without them. But it bothered me how often we’d reach for things like metronidazole for every single case of vomiting or diarrhea. No one really thought about the damage to the microbiome or the underlying cause.
Dr. Dobias:
I see that in practice, too—medicating without digging in, or just following a protocol because it’s what’s expected. And yet, we now know how much collateral damage that approach can do. It’s so easy to get tunnel vision, especially under pressure.
Dr. Loudon:
Exactly. I started seeing trends, like immune-mediated diseases that cropped up after routine vaccines, especially in older dogs. And unfortunately, most of the time, the connection isn’t made until it’s too late. It was really frustrating.
Dr. Dobias:
So you're seeing the patterns that I have seen as well. Do you think the burden and the weight of the fact that we're causing harm actually prevents us from seeing what is actually happening? I believe that most vets are well-intentioned and that they do things that they believe in. So, why is it so difficult for some of us to see what is going on?
Dr. Loudon:
Definitely. You know, I had this conversation with an elderly vet, who had been doing it longer than I, probably 50 years. He's passionate and well-intentioned and he's dedicated his life to his patients. A cat came to me from him. The owner had wanted to make sure they were doing everything possible. He hadn't been to the vet since he was a kitten, and he told the vet to “just do everything that you need to do to keep him healthy."
This vet gave the 15-year-old cat four vaccines, who also had symptoms of hyperthyroidism. Within hours, he was in my ER, and I was trying to save his life.
I called the vet, and he was so upset about it. He believed that's what was taught, and if he wasn’t doing that, he was risking that patient. He truly believed, in his heart, that's what he had to do to protect his patients.
By the end of our conversation, he said, “I will change some things. I will get the blood results back before I give any vaccines, and I'll consider stopping vaccines sooner."
So he did see my point, but he had a conviction that was how he was protecting his patients, and I believed him.
Dr. Dobias:
There’s so much pressure to believe we’re right, and a deep fear of not knowing. We work hard for our titles, but it’s easy to lose sight of the value of listening, changing, and learning from others. Too often, the profession rewards certainty over curiosity.
Views on Vaccinations
Dr. Dobias:
This brings us to the hot topic: vaccines and over-vaccination. What’s your approach now?
Dr. Loudon:
I titer all puppies after one, maybe two vaccines. I can honestly say I’ve never had a puppy need three full rounds. And for my own dogs? Other than rabies—because of travel rules—I haven’t vaccinated in years. Their parvo and distemper antibodies have lasted for life.
Dr. Dobias:
That matches my experience exactly! I won’t even consider starting vaccines before 12 weeks, and always check titers. The science is pretty clear that, if anything, too-early and too-much vaccination interferes with healthy, lifelong immunity. Sometimes the conventional approach is so at odds with what we now know!
Dr. Loudon:
And the trend with breeders giving puppies multiple early vaccines and dewormers before they’re even ready? I’ve seen so many tragic cases where their bone marrow just gives up. Those are the calls I can’t fix.
Hormone Health and Our Dogs
Dr. Dobias:
I’ve seen the same in my practice, and it segues into another issue—hormonal health in spayed and neutered dogs.
I shared my own journey with hormone replacement after my young border collie Pax was neutered. His health absolutely crumbled until we dove into research by Dr. Michelle Kutzler and others, showing the cascade of issues triggered by hormonal deprivation. When I started him on HRT, I finally got my dog back.
Dr. Loudon:
That makes perfect sense to me, especially given how many orthopedic emergencies I see in desexed dogs compared to intact ones. There’s just a difference—you see it in their coats, their muscles, even their spirit. It all points back to the metabolic importance of preserving hormones as long as we can.
Learn more about Hormone Health, Hormone Replacement Therapy and Hormone Sparing Sterilization here.
Nutrition & The Gut Microbiome
Dr. Dobias:
If there is one thing you can say to do or don’t do to avoid emergencies, what is it?
Dr. Loudon:
I would say get the nutrition right. Work on your dog's nutrition and their gut biome, because their gut microbiome is– 70, 80% of their immune system. Your dogs going to be healthier, and it's going to prevent a lot of the things that come up. Less trips to the ER with those gastrointestinal symptoms if you have that right.
Another thing is to listen to your gut, because guardians know their dogs better than any vet ever will, and you know if your dog is off. If something's not right, if something you're doing is not sitting with your dog, listen to that intuition, because it's real. Be their advocate and speak up for them.
Insights on Gastric Dilatation Volvulus (Bloat)
Dr. Dobias:
Have you seen a link between diet and bloat (GDV)? I've observed in my practice that the animals who suffer from this condition have sensitivity, an injury or spondylosis around the thoracic lumbar junction, which in Chinese medicine is connected to the stomach and pancreas.
Dr. Loudon:
I never noticed that connection, but that's amazing.
Dr. Dobias:
It's probably not the only factor, but I think the spine is very much the energy highway for the body, and it supplies all the organs and parts of the body. So it's an interesting thing.
Dr. Loudon:
The one thing I would say, and I've done hundreds of bloat surgeries, it is probably one of our most common surgeries in the ER – I've never cut a dog that was raw fed. They were all on kibble.
Community: Teaching and Advocacy for Pet Guardians
Dr. Dobias:
I know that you've been very active with your community. You've created a charity, and you also have an online professional community and a dog lover community. Can you tell me a little bit more about that?
Dr. Loudon:
I mainly left the ER because I wanted to get in front of guardians before they needed the ER. It was actually after that cat that I spoke about that I was like, "That's it. I've got to do something." And so I started an online membership called the Dog Mom Society, where I can guide guardians through making the right choices with nutrition, preventative care, and just be there to support them.
It's growing. I've got other professionals and experts in there now helping me, including nutritionists. We're going to start an emergency hotline within it because I find I'm often helping clients when they call me from the ER. “I'm in the ER. I need you to walk me through it.” So that's my Dog Mom Society, where it's just those guardians who want to make the right decision. They want to learn and get the knowledge in order to do that.
Then I started an online business when I came out of the ER. The technology was so hard to figure out, and it took me a long time to learn how to build it. But after taking all these courses, I finally figured it out, and I couldn't stop talking about it and teaching other people. So that's another way that I can help bring holistic medicine and the changes in the standards of care for our dogs, by teaching online business to other holistic practitioners, so that their voices can be heard. So I have the Canine Experts Academy, and I teach online business there.
And then I have a Healing Haven Animal Foundation, which is my non-profit. As an ER vet, I will never not treat a patient because they can't afford it. If I know how to save it, if I can save their life, I'm going to save it. But that gets expensive, and it's hard to do – logistically, you can't keep doing it. So I created my non-profit to pay for life-saving care in the ER for those patients whose owners would have to euthanize because of money, or they don't have an advocate and a stray off the street needing a surgery. That's why I created Healing Haven.
Dr. Dobias:
You've got a big heart, and you obviously know how to manage time. When it comes to helping dog lovers, helping colleagues, and on top of that, helping dogs and dog lovers who can't afford the care, it's really amazing. I think there always has to be, you know, they say that the happiest people are the ones who really give without expecting anything in return.
Euthanasia: Heart, Healing, and Letting Go
Dr. Dobias:
You also do home euthanasia. Kudos to you. I must confess, every time I had to euthanize a patient, it felt like it took a piece of me. How do you hold that space for people and animals?
Dr. Loudon:
It’s hard to explain, but I connect with my patients, especially when it’s around euthanasia. I feel the animals' energy. After so many years, I know when they’re ready and at peace—and that gives me so much comfort.
For me, the hardest part is the guardians' suffering. Sometimes I'll have dogs that have not walked in a week, and they walk to the door, and I do warn them that this might happen, and they're like, "I can't even believe this just happened." Sometimes it can be confusing because they think he's better. But they are not. I feel that from the dogs. I don't feel the suffering. I don't feel fear. I feel like, "Thank you. I'm ready to go." And they know they're not ending, and that's what I get from them. I leave there, talking to them, and I feel them.
So, for me, it's not like I'm taking this life away. I never feel that. And when I go into these rooms of people, families, I get goosebumps talking about it. It's such a beautiful, sacred space of love. The love that's poured in, the memories you can just see them, of the memories of teenagers now that have grown up with this dog and how beautiful this dog has walked this journey with them, and I get to witness it and feel it every day, multiple times a day.
So for me, it gives to me, it doesn't take from me. I leave there feeling like, yes, I feel compassion for the guardians so much because I know what that feels like, and I feel their suffering, but I feel the love so much more and the experience of it.
Dr. Dobias:
I must agree to actually be there and have the privilege to say goodbye to our patients and be there for them. I've had situations where we would actually do most of the euthanasia, so I try to do it at home. If I could do a house call, I would because I know that the animals feel better, and sometimes people would prepare a little gathering, or they would open a bottle of wine, and they would share pictures. And we would cry and laugh. It's an interesting opportunity for us to witness that dying is actually not as terrifying as we think it is.
We live our lives being terrified of dying, but when you witness it over and over in this beautiful form, it's a little relief, I think, for at least I'm not afraid of dying. I think that the worst case scenario is when people don't have the quality of life, and animals don't have the quality of life for years, and they suffer.
Each dog teaches us something new, and none of us ever gets it all right the first time. The best we can do is to do the best we can with the information we have. Be present, enjoy the journey we share with our animals, and continue learning. We're truly all in this together—supporting, learning, and evolving to give our dogs (and ourselves) the best lives possible.
FAQs
How many vaccines does my puppy really need?
Generally, 1-2 should be sufficient for life. Titers should be checked, and if antibodies are present, no further vaccinations need to be given. Learn more.
What about adult dogs?
For adult dogs, only necessary vaccines like rabies should be given (when required by law), and antibody levels (titers) should be done to avoid unnecessary boosters. Learn more.
What is hormone-sparing sterilization?
Ovary-sparing spay for females, vasectomy for males. These preserve hormones while preventing unwanted litters. Read more.
Do diet and nutrition really impact my dog’s risk for emergencies?
Yes. Nutrition, particularly a diverse and healthy gut microbiome, is foundational to overall health and immune resilience.
How do I know when it’s the right time for euthanasia?
Trust your intuition. Sometimes, animals hold on until their guardians give them loving permission to let go, so being emotionally present and at peace is important.
How can I advocate for my dog with my vet?
Ask questions and provide as much information as possible. Mutual respect is important for working effectively together.
