Milk Thistle for your Pets

There are two great, over-the-counter supplements that you can give to your pets that could make a huge difference in their overall health: Milk thistle and L-Lysine. In this post, we’ll cover Milk Thistle, a common “weed” with extraordinary healing properties.

Milk Thistle

PetEducation.com, the veterinary resource arm of Drs Foster & Smith, says that “milk thistle is well-known for its use in liver disease”. That’s an understatement.
In humans, it has shown positive effects in treating nearly every known form of liver disease, including cirrhosis, hepatitis, necroses, and liver damage due to drug and alcohol abuse. Milk thistle works due to its ability to inhibit the factors responsible for liver damage, coupled with the fact it stimulates production of new liver cells to replace old damaged ones.

I stumbled upon it because I had read that if you want to alleviate environmental toxins from hormones, pesticides, detergents, etc. (a topic of interest to me), you need to “heal” your liver, and milk thistle is the herbal remedy of choice. Your liver is basically a filter and it tires and wears out as we grow older. That “regeneration” property mentioned above really gets your attention!

But once I started reading about it, the documented health benefits just don’t quit. I am now quite a fan and won’t go without it.

Several of my friends and family, concerned about liver damage from medications such as acetominophen, have also seen the need to take it.

This link in an herbal encyclopedia speaks to some of the health benefits.

http://www.kcweb.com/herb/milkt.htm

For veterinary use, it is often recommended by holistic veterinarians to treat canine and feline liver disease. Specifically, Dr. Shawn Messonier, who writes for Animal Wellness Magazine, and holistic websites such as littlebigcat. Here is one of Dr. Shawn’s articles on milk thistle, wow.

http://www.petcarenaturally.com/articles/liver-disease.php

Note that for veterinary use, Dr. Shawn recommends that you only use milk thistle if your pet develops a liver problem. And while I will advise you to always consult with a vet when wanting to use milk thistle, most vets are not into holistic or herbal remedies and may not be familiar with this one.

For the purists among you, here is a link to an Alternative Medicine study that searched through all of the medical databases to see if there was anything to the alternative community’s recommendations for milk thistle. While they are very scientific and complain loudly about lack of certain types of studies and data on dosage and quality, and ask questions about was this success due to the duration of the treatment or the early stage of the disease, they do conclude that there is enough benefit to milk thistle to warrant further study.

http://www.ahrq.gov/clinic/epcsums/milktsum.htm
If I can just add my own opinion… 90% of what comes through our mouths gets filtered by the liver. But the melamine contamination in the 2007 pet food recall created crystals in the kidneys and that’s what killed the animals. I doubt if any research has been done to see if milk thistle would have prevented this condition… and indeed, just with my layman’s understanding, it doesn’t look like it would have.

THAT said, there are many other types of toxins our pets can be exposed to and if those toxins result in liver aging or distress, milk thistle might be a great remedy.

Teresa Holladay, “The Pet Food Lady”
http://holisticpetfood.wordpress.com