My Dog Is Better Than Your Dog

There is a moment almost every pet parent will face and almost nobody is prepared for it. You are sitting with your dog and it hits you. We are getting closer to the end. And then comes the flood. The emotions. The questions you did not know how to ask. The guilt you did not see coming. The decisions that feel impossible because you are making them for someone who cannot tell you what they want.

Dr. Jenn Roedig is a licensed veterinarian and the founder of Sage Paws, a virtual practice built entirely around supporting pet parents through their animal's aging, illness, and end of life. She has guided over 500 families through this space. And two months before we recorded this conversation, she lost her own dog Luke unexpectedly the night before Easter to a ruptured splenic mass.

She shares that story in this episode. It is raw and it is real.
We talk about guilt, probably the most common emotion pet parents carry, and what is actually underneath it. We talk about anticipatory grief, the kind that starts weeks or months before the loss when nobody around you understands why you are already mourning. And we talk about how to know when it is time, and why you will know is not always a good enough answer.
Dr. Lily also shares something personal in this one. She lost her heart dog in 2020 and still carries pieces of that ending with her.

KEY INSIGHTS:

✨ Guilt is probably the most common emotion pet parents experience around end of life and it is almost never talked about openly because pet loss is grief that society does not fully recognize. Guilt loves isolation. It feeds on silence.
✨ Naming it is the first step to moving through it. Dr. Jenn calls it naming it to tame it. Once you can see what is underneath the guilt, you start to take your power back.
✨ Saying you will know when it is time is not always helpful. It depends on the disease, the pet, the family's values, and what too soon or too late means to each person.
✨ Look at good hours, not just good days. A day can be called good but if it only had four good hours and twenty bad ones, that matters. Quality of life is nuanced and individual to every pet and every family.
✨ Notice what they stop disliking, not just what they stop liking. Dr. Jenn's dog Luke used to bark at delivery drivers. She knew that if that ever stopped, something was really wrong.
✨ Anticipatory grief is real and it is disenfranchised. Nobody around you may understand why you are already grieving a pet that is still alive. You are not alone in that and you do not have to carry it alone.
✨ Journaling or voice noting your thoughts for ten minutes a day can help break the spiral. Getting it out of your head and onto paper gives it somewhere to live so it stops consuming you at 3am.
✨ The best time to have these conversations is before you need them. Families who plan ahead, even loosely, are more prepared to make meaningful decisions under pressure.
✨ Dr. Jenn's sessions are 90 minutes and completely virtual. She works with pet parents anywhere in the world.
✨ Vets are not trained for these conversations in vet school. A resource like Sage Paws does not replace the veterinarian. It fills the gap the vet does not have time to fill.

RESOURCES:
Sage Paws: https://www.sagepaws.com/
Instagram: @_sage_paws
Sessions: 90 minutes, virtual, available worldwide
Linktr.ee: @sagepaws

FOLLOW:Integrative Pet Wellness Center: https://integrativepet.com/
Instagram: @integrativepet
Threads: @integrativepet
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Dr. Lily Chen:
Instagram: @dr.lilychen @the.unicorn.vet
Threads: @the.unicorn.vet
LinkedIn: Lily Chen, DVM, CVA

Your Dog's Tongue Is Trying to Tell You Something w/ Carol Bramson

The next time your dog is lying next to you totally relaxed, look at their tongue. Is it pale pink or a deep angry red? Dry or moist? Purple around the edges? To most of us that is just a tongue. But in a tradition practiced for thousands of years it is your dog communicating with you about what is happening inside their body.
Carol Bramson is the founder of Side by Side Pet, a whole food pet nutrition company built on Eastern food therapy. She grew up in a household where food was health, spent years visiting over 3,000 food ingredient suppliers across the US and Europe, and then got her first dog, Wrigley, was handed a bag of kibble, and thought this does not look like food.
Wrigley is 11 now and everyone who meets him thinks he is about two.
We get into the energetics of food, warming cooling and neutral, why gut health has to come first before food can even do its job, why seizures and hot spots so often trace back to what is in the bowl, and why the answer to changing pet health is collaboration not competition.

KEY INSIGHTS:
✨ Food has energetic properties understood for thousands of years in Eastern medicine. Warming foods support a body running cold. Cooling foods calm a body running hot. Matching the food to the dog can change everything.
✨ The tongue tells you what is happening inside. Side by Side built an AI balance indicator that analyzes a photo of your dog's tongue and recommends which food type their body needs right now.
✨ Gut health has to come first. A dog on kibble for years may not have the microorganisms needed to absorb nutrients from whole food. Rebuilding the microbiome before or alongside the transition matters.
✨ Dr. Lily tested kibble-fed dogs and found high levels of glyphosate and mycotoxins. A major pet food company told her the levels were within acceptable range for humans. Pets are not small people.
✨ Seizures in dogs correlate strongly with toxic load. Dr. Lily has seen seizure frequency decrease significantly when toxins are cleared and diet changes. We reach for drugs before we ask what is driving the problem.
✨ Whole food nutrients cannot be replicated by synthetic supplements. The structural combination of fiber, vitamins, and minerals in a whole food is what the body is designed to absorb. Your doctor tells you to eat broccoli, not broccoli powder.
✨ Feeding the same food every single day for years is not variety. Rotating proteins and adding fresh toppers even in small amounts builds microbial diversity and signals to the body that it is safe to adapt.
✨ The pet food industry changes when consumers change where they spend their money. Even the largest kibble companies are launching fresh food lines because that is where demand is going.
✨ Side by Side's Giving Fund provides whole food nutrition to dogs in need with a special focus on service, therapy, and care dogs.
✨ There are not enough pets eating well. Every brand, vet, and pet parent working toward that goal is on the same side.

RESOURCES:
Side by Side Pet: https://www.sidebysidepet.com
Instagram: @sidebysidepet
Facebook: @sidebysidepet
Tiktok: @sidebysidepet

Available on: sidebysidepet.com, Amazon, Chewy and independent boutique pet stores

FOLLOW:
Integrative Pet Wellness Center: https://integrativepet.com
Instagram: @integrativepet
Threads: @integrativepet
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Dr. Lily Chen:
Instagram: @dr.lilychen @the.unicorn.vet
Threads: @the.unicorn.vet
LinkedIn: Lily Chen, DVM, CVA & The Unicorn Vet

This one is for every veterinarian who has ever felt like an island.
But it is also for every pet parent who has ever wondered what it actually takes for a vet to practice medicine on their own terms, and why so many of the best ones end up building something from scratch.
Dr. Judy Jasek never wanted to own a business. She became an entrepreneur because it was the only way she could practice the medicine she believed in. She bought a conventional practice, stopped doing as many vaccines because she believed they were harming her patients, and watched her revenue plummet. Then she built a full integrative hospital, burned out under the weight of it, sold it, sat through a three year non-compete, and rebuilt from the front room of her house. No debt. No bank loan. Just a mat on the floor and a willingness to see what happened.
It thrived.
Dr. Lily started the same way. House calls, then 500 square feet, a mat and a desk, no X-ray machine, no surgery suite. The only piece of equipment she needs to plug in today is her ozone machine.
This conversation also goes into the loss of empathy in the veterinary profession since COVID, what drove it, and why both Dr. Judy and Dr. Lily believe that healing is an art that is at risk of being lost.
KEY INSIGHTS:
✨ Most holistic vets become entrepreneurs by necessity, not choice. The only way to practice authentically is often to build something yourself.
✨ You do not need a big loan, a big space, or all the equipment. Dr. Judy rebuilt from her front room. Dr. Lily started with house calls and 500 square feet. Both practices thrived.
✨ Avoiding debt is one of the most important decisions you can make when starting a practice. When you own debt, you feel trapped. When you own nothing, you are free to practice the way you want.
✨ Find the modality that is uniquely yours and go all in on that. You do not have to do everything. Every other clinic is already doing everything. Your niche eliminates your competition.
✨ The curbside drop-off era during COVID did profound damage to the veterinarian-client bond. The loss of empathy in the profession since that time is something both Dr. Judy and Dr. Lily are seeing firsthand.
✨ Corporate practice appointments run every 10 to 15 minutes. There is not enough time to sit on the floor, listen to the family, explore options, or practice medicine that feels like medicine.
✨ Informed consent is how veterinarians are supposed to practice. Explaining the risks, the whys, the regulations, and letting the family make the choice. Not badgering, not enforcing, not checking boxes.
✨ Clients follow doctors, not clinics. When you practice from the heart, people are drawn to that energy. The right clients will find you.
✨ Healing is an art. Every veterinarian has unique gifts. The world needs those gifts, not another clinic that does the same things as the 10 clinics around it.
✨ If you feel like an island in this profession, you are not alone. There are more of us than you think.

RESOURCES:
Animal Healing Arts: https://ahavet.com
Instagram: @judyjasek
Facebook: @Animal Healing Arts
Substack: https://judyjasekdvm.substack.com
Membership (free to join): https://ahavet.com/membership

FOLLOW:
Integrative Pet Wellness Center: https://integrativepet.com
Instagram: @integrativepet
Threads: @integrativepet
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Dr. Lily Chen:
Instagram: @dr.lilychen @the.unicorn.vet
Threads: @the.unicorn.vet
LinkedIn: Lily Chen, DVM, CVA & The Unicorn Vet

Your Pet Is Not Worried About Dying. You Are.
What if the tumor is not the disease? What if it is the body's way of telling us something went wrong a long time ago, and the real work is figuring out what that was?
Dr. Judy Jasek graduated from Colorado State University in 1988 and spent years in conventional practice before something shifted. Her own horse developed a behavioral problem that no conventional approach could touch. An energetic chiropractor turned the animal around completely, and once Dr. Judy started looking at medicine differently, she could not stop.
Nearly 40 years later, she runs Animal Healing Arts, a telemedicine practice rooted in what she calls the Terrain Paradigm: the idea that health is the body's natural state, and our job is to figure out what knocked the body off balance and help it return.
We talk about mistletoe therapy, ozone, Chinese herbal medicine, why she almost never recommends surgery as a first step, and why your pet is not worried about dying from cancer. They just want to live a happy life. And the energy you bring into the room, fear or gratitude, directly affects their healing.

KEY INSIGHTS:
✨ The tumor is the tip of the iceberg. It is a warning sign that the body's toxic load has exceeded what it can handle. Removing the tumor without addressing what caused it is incomplete.
✨ Cancer rates are rising in young dogs. Lymphoma in two-year-olds, aggressive tumors in four-year-olds. This was not something seen 20 or 30 years ago and it is a wake-up call.
✨ Dr. Judy's first question for every cancer patient is not about the diagnosis. It is how is the pet doing. A pet that is still eating, vigorous, and enjoying life has a lot to work with.
✨ Mistletoe therapy has been used in human oncology in Europe for over 100 years. In Germany, roughly 70% of human cancer patients receive it. It is immunomodulating, has direct anti-cancer effects, and can be administered at home.
✨ Fever after mistletoe treatment can be a sign the immune system is waking up, not a sign something is wrong. Warming the body activates enzymatic pathways that support healing.
✨ Ozone therapy oxygenates the body at a cellular level. When pets are tired after ozone treatment, it is often because the body has been given a healing tool and needs to rest to use it.
✨ Dr. Judy almost never recommends surgery as a first step. Unless there is a life-threatening blockage or bleed, she focuses on supporting the body first and correcting what led to the cancer.
✨ Success does not have to mean the tumor is gone. Can the pet live with this comfortably with good quality of life? That is a more realistic and more achievable goal than elimination.
✨ Your pet does not know they have cancer. They want to eat, play, and curl up next to you. The fear and grief you carry around them affects their healing. Gratitude and presence are medicine.
✨ Prevention is the most powerful tool. Testing the gut microbiome, vitamin D levels, and toxic burden early, before anything shows up on bloodwork, gives the body the best chance to come back into balance before disease develops.
✨ Diarrhea is not a metronidazole deficiency. Any symptom the body produces naturally has a reason. The question is not how do we stop this, it is what is the body trying to tell us.

RESOURCES:
Animal Healing Arts: https://ahavet.com
Instagram: @animal.healing.arts
Facebook: @animalhealingarts
Substack: judyjasekdvm.substack.com
👉 Membership (free to join): https://ahavet.com/membership-agreement/

FOLLOW:
Integrative Pet Wellness Center: https://integrativepet.com
Instagram: @integrativepet
Threads: @integrativepet
TikTok: @integrativepet
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Dr. Lily Chen:
Instagram: @dr.lilychen @the.unicorn.vet
Threads: @the.unicorn.vet
LinkedIn: Lily Chen, DVM, CVA

This one started as a continuation after the main episode wrapped up.

Heather Gibson and Dr. Lily just kept talking, and what came next was more honest and more direct than anything in the main episode. They got into the coefficient of inbreeding, a term becoming a bigger deal in the breeding world that Dr. Lily had never heard before, and why Heather made the controversial decision to move from purebred to mixed breeding for the sake of dog health.
Then Heather asked Dr. Lily about microbiome testing, fecal transplants, and why vets are still using metronidazole as a first line dewormer for puppies. That part got Dr. Lily fired up.
Shorter, a little more raw, and very much a conversation between two people from different corners of pet care who both care deeply about getting this right.

KEY INSIGHTS: 
✨ The coefficient of inbreeding measures how genetically similar a puppy's parents are. Lower numbers mean more genetic diversity, which generally means better health, stronger immunity, and fewer inherited diseases. 
✨ Pedigrees alone cannot tell the full story. Two dogs from completely different lines, even different continents, can still be genetically too similar. Companies like Embark now calculate this before a breeding ever happens. 
✨ Many purebred dogs are already mixed breeds, just from centuries ago. Golden Retrievers were originally Irish Setters, Bloodhounds, a Tweed Spaniel, and reportedly a dog from the side of the road. 
✨ Heather moved from purebred to mixed breeding because she saw health issues she did not believe could be resolved without more genetic diversity. It is not anti-purebred. It is pro-health. 
✨ Asking a breeder whether they test for coefficient of inbreeding is one of the most important questions a pet parent can ask and most never think to. 
✨ Metronidazole is wildly overused as a first line dewormer for puppies. Some puppies arrive at eight weeks already having had three or four rounds, leaving their gut microbiome already depleted before they ever come home. 
✨ Giardia can be cleared naturally without antibiotics. Dr. Lily has done it and trained vets to do it successfully with microbiome testing before and after to prove it. It takes more work but builds a far more resilient gut. 
✨ Not every dog needs a fecal transplant. Some improve with diet changes and the right supplements. But choosing supplements without microbiome data first can sometimes make things worse. 
✨ Fecal microbiome restoration does not require sedation or invasive prep. At Dr. Lily's clinic it is a gentle one to two minute procedure. Animals go home exactly as they came in. 
✨ Research takes an average of 20 years to move from a journal into standard clinical practice. Our pets do not have 20 years to wait.
 ✨ Testing the mother's microbiome before breeding could be one of the most impactful things we do for puppy health since her microbiome becomes the puppy's starting point for life.

RESOURCES:
Big Hearted Breeders: https://www.bigheartedbreeders.com Instagram: @bigheartedbreeders
Facebook: @bigheartedbreeders
YouTube:@Bigheartedbreeders

AnimalBiome: https://www.animalbiome.com
AHVMA Vet Directory: https://www.ahvma.org
Magic of Microbiome Course for Vets: https://theunicorn.academy

FOLLOW:
Integrative Pet Wellness Center: https://integrativepet.com Instagram: @integrativepet
Threads: @integrativepet
TikTok: @integrativepet
Youtube: @integrativepet
Sign up to our newsletter to get more holistic pet care tips 🐶🐈‍⬛
Dr. Lily Chen:
Instagram: @dr.lilychen @the.unicorn.vet
Threads: @the.unicorn.vet
LinkedIn: Lily Chen, DVM, CVA