Supplements for the non-expert (which certainly includes me) can be a minefield of dangers. People often tend to conclude that since herbs are "natural," they are also benign. Although I tried to choose supplements that had some record of safe use in cats, I often had to settle for a very tenuous definition of "use." Substances that present no problems at all to humans can cause very serious problems for cats. One of the herbal extracts I give even has its detractors in human use! The supplements themselves (as vets frequently remind pet owners) are not subject to the strict quality controls of FDA-approved drugs. Arthur Gittleman, who puts up a web site substantially devoted to herbal treatment of FIV, tells the story of a sample of olive leaf extract (one of the herbs I use) being pulled from the shelf and tested in the laboratory. Despite the claim on the label that the product contained a "standardized" 15% of the active ingredient, oleuropein, it was found to contain none at all. No wonder, Gittleman says, an ancient Greek carried a lamp everywhere he went, searching for an honest man.
Bud is currently tipping the scales at a lusty ten pounds. Now, to those among you with cats who passed that mark when they were still virtual kittens, this may seem like no big deal. But it's been quite some time since Bud put up those kind of figures. FIV cats often come in two types: lean and leaner.
I can't know what the future holds for the current version of Bud's FIV Therapy (the title of his web site), but I look at this as a war. Every day that I come away the victor in that day's battle is a good day. Henry David Thoreau once said, "I learned this, at least, by my experiment: that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams...he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours." I don't know about the "confidence" part, but my success has certainly been unexpected. I will take whatever I can get.
About the Author:
I belong to both the FivCats and Fiv-Cats Yahoo groups and to my local SPCA chapter. I have owned cats my entire life and have had Bud since 1993, when I first began caring for him as a stray. My web site "Bud's FIV Therapy" is devoted to largely experimental therapies that I have used in recent years to address Bud's primary infection, FIV, as distinct from secondary complications caused by the disease.
