For 250 years, veterinary medicine and its scientific underpinning, veterinary science, have struggled to gain the confidence and respect of clients, fellow health scientists and practitioners, and the general public. And it has been accomplished by means of the scientific method and strict objectivity. To embrace unproven or even discredited “complementary and alternative” techniques surely is regressive both for patients and for veterinarians. Veterinary medicine has always been open and sympathetic to new treatment and diagnostic modalities, but only when they have been proven in controlled studies. In 2002, Abraham Verghese wrote in the New York Times about cancer in humans, “I am not a crusader against alternative medicines.
