How to Talk to Your Vet When You Want to Go Holistic

I recorded this one with Dr. Katie Kangas live at SuperZoo, right after I'd just wrapped a conversation with Greg Tilford about herbalism. I brought his line straight into this conversation because it set up everything we talked about: being holistic doesn't mean ignoring allopathic medicine. It means taking the whole picture into account, and if you're refusing to even consider a tool in your toolbox, you're not actually being holistic. You're just being selective.

That's the real premise of this episode. Not "holistic versus conventional." Being your pet's actual advocate, which turns out to be a much harder and more nuanced job than picking a side.

Listen to the full podcast episode with Dr. Katie Kangas here. 

You need a team, not a single point of failure

Dr. Katie's tagline for her practice has been the same for years: empowering pet parents to be the best advocate for their pet. Her point is that for most of veterinary and human medical history, the model was simple obedience: the doctor talks, you listen, you don't ask questions. That's shifting, and fast, but it means pet parents are being asked to hold more responsibility than they were ever taught how to carry.

Her fix isn't "do more research alone." It's building an actual team, and she counts more people on that team than most of us do. Obviously your primary veterinarian, but possibly more than one: an allopathic vet nearby for bloodwork and diagnostics, a holistic or integrative vet you consult with by telemedicine, specialists like an oncologist or neurologist when something specific is going on. But she also included people most haven't thought to put in that category on purpose.

Your groomer, for one. With how many households now have doodles and other non-shedding, high-maintenance coats, a groomer isn't just handling cosmetics, they're doing hands-on health monitoring on a body most owners aren't actually touching consistently between visits. Dr. Katie's exact words: groomers have told her flatly that some dogs coming in monthly clearly haven't been brushed or touched at all in between. A good groomer is often the first person to flag a new lump, a skin issue, or a behavior change.

Your nutritionist or pet health coach, obviously. And then, a little further out on the spectrum but genuinely relevant: your pets themselves, watching each other when you're not home, and even your technology. Pet cams catching a limp or a seizure while you're at work. Dr. Katie mentioned being contacted by a company making litter boxes with built-in cameras and scales, tracking a cat's weight just from them stepping in to use it, which is a genuinely clever way to catch early weight loss, often one of the first signs something's wrong in cats specifically.

The Dr. Google problem (and now, the AI problem)

Here's where this got into territory I think about constantly. Dr. Katie was clear: she doesn't want to discourage pet parents from researching. She wants them to research well. Her actual standard: don't take the first result you find as gospel. If you're looking up something as simple as a Benadryl dose for a bee sting, check at least two or three sources and see if they agree before you act. Consider the source itself: is this a credible veterinary organization, or an anonymous blog with no stated credentials behind it?

That standard gets a lot more urgent once you factor in how most people are actually searching now. This is the current reality: a 2026 study published in BMJ Open tested five major AI chatbots (Gemini, ChatGPT, Meta AI, Grok, and DeepSeek) against health questions spanning cancer, nutrition, vaccines, and more. Half of all responses were rated problematic, with roughly one in five rated highly problematic, and not a single chatbot produced a fully accurate reference list, with citation completeness averaging just 40% (BMJ Group summary of chatbot health accuracy study). Separately, a 2026 health technology hazards report ranked AI chatbot misuse as the single greatest health technology hazard of the year, noting that over 40 million people are now consulting AI for health information daily (AI hallucination statistics, Axis Intelligence). AI can be a genuinely useful starting point. It is not a source you take verbatim, for you or for your pet.

There's a layer under this that most pet parents (and honestly, most small businesses in this space) haven't fully clocked yet. The way search results get ranked was never actually "best information wins," it was "best SEO wins." That same dynamic is now repeating itself inside AI search specifically. Whoever structures their content in a way AI tools favor gets surfaced and cited inside the answer itself, a discipline that now has its own name: answer engine optimization, or AEO. AI-driven search traffic grew nearly 43% year over year into 2026 (AEO 2026 overview, Contently). None of that tracks with medical accuracy. It tracks with who optimized for the algorithm. Worth remembering every time an AI answer sounds confident.

How to actually bring this up with your vet

This is the part I most wanted from Dr. Katie, because "just advocate for your pet" is easy to say and genuinely hard to do face to face in an exam room.

Her advice, if you already have a specific thing you don't want (say, a vaccine or treatment you've researched and want to avoid): don't lead with it defensively before anyone's even suggested it. Walking in and immediately announcing what you refuse to do puts the vet on the back foot before you've even had a conversation, and it tends to produce a worse appointment for everyone. Instead, let the visit happen naturally. If the vet brings up the specific treatment, that's your actual moment: "I've read into this and I'd rather avoid it for now, what are my other options?" is a completely different conversation than leading with a refusal. It keeps the door open for the vet to explain their reasoning, and keeps you in a position to still say no, just without torching the relationship in the first sixty seconds.

If you already know you're not aligned with a conventional-first practice in general, her advice shifts: don't keep going back to a vet whose default toolbox doesn't include what you're looking for. Find a practitioner who already offers more than just the allopathic-first approach, so you're not having this negotiation at every single visit.

Don't let "holistic" talk you out of diagnostics

This one is worth sitting with (really, take a moment right now) if you're deep in the holistic space already: Dr. Katie was direct that skipping bloodwork or imaging in the name of being natural isn't actually holistic, it's just working with less information. As an integrative vet, she said plainly that more information about what's actually going on in the body lets her target and customize recommendations far better, whether the plan ends up being supplements, herbs, acupuncture, or something conventional. That doesn't mean every limping dog needs a $4,000 MRI. It means don't skip the reasonably-priced groundwork (routine bloodwork, basic imaging) just because you're trying to stay natural. You're not being more holistic by having less data. You're just guessing with better intentions.

Making the hard calls: her cancer example

Dr. Katie gave a genuinely useful framework for the hardest kind of decision a pet parent faces. If a client says they don't want to pursue chemotherapy for their pet, she doesn't push back on the decision itself, every choice made for real reasons is valid, and some cancers respond well to chemo while others don't. But if a pet parent is still uncertain rather than firmly decided, her recommendation is to get an actual consult with an oncologist before ruling it out. A consult isn't a commitment. It's information: statistics for that specific cancer, what treatment would actually involve, cost, invasiveness, expected outcomes. Then you get to make the call from an informed place instead of a guess, and you're far less likely to end up second-guessing or regretting the decision later, whichever way you go.

What she's actually looking for from you

I loved this detail: Dr. Katie's new-patient intake form asks how you found her practice. Not as small talk, it's diagnostic. If someone says they're already following credible integrative sources or came through a referral from someone already deep in this space, she knows she can meet them at a more advanced level immediately. If someone's starting from zero, she adjusts and builds the foundational context first. Her point: she's not trying to talk above you or below you, she's trying to actually meet you where you are, which is a two-way responsibility. The more context you can give your own vet about what you already know and where you're coming from, the better they can actually serve you instead of guessing at your starting point too.

Where to find more of this

Dr. Katie now co-hosts a new podcast with Clayton Payne, a UK-based pet industry veteran, called Challenging Pet Health. Their tagline: question, challenge, improve. Episodes run 30 minutes or less, short enough to knock out two on a walk, and Katie brings the clinical and medical lens while Clayton pulls back the curtain on what's actually happening in pet product manufacturing and marketing, a side of the industry most of us never see. You can find it on Spotify and other major podcast platforms.

One episode she mentioned genuinely made me happy: a deep dive comparing animal-based fiber (fur, feathers) to plant-based fiber, which lines up directly with what I've been writing about in ReWild Your Pet's Diet. It's not that blood, fur, and feathers need to be the base of your dog's diet, but they're natural foods our pets evolved eating that most modern feeding approaches quietly leave out entirely. I'm so glad that others are talking about this too!

If you want to go back further with Dr. Katie, we covered her homeopathic remedy line and how blended homeopathy actually works in an earlier episode.

At the end of the day, being your pet's advocate isn't about picking allopathic or holistic and defending that choice forever. It's building a team you trust, asking better questions of every source (human, AI, or otherwise), and walking into that exam room informed enough to actually participate in the decision instead of just receiving it.

Listen to the full podcast episode with Dr. Katie Kangas here.