Bibliographic record
Abstract
Veterinary Herbal Medicine is a comprehensive, readable, current, and informative treatise on the use of herbs in veterinary practice. With its rational approach, background material, and references, this book discusses the credible use of herbs in veterinary science. This is an excellent addition to every open-minded veterinary practitioner’s desk. The book is divided into 5 sections preceded by an introduction. Here, the principal authors outline the advantages of herbs in chronic conditions that are inadequately served by conventional pharmacology. All the chapters have clear subheadings with numerous tables and references; useful Web sites are also included. Unlike nearly all the other books about herbal medicine, the materia medica is only 1 chapter. It is comprehensive at over 200 pages and the authors describe the numerous plants, their actions and clinical uses, and the doses and practical dosing information completely; all are well-referenced. The 5 sections are written by Wynn, Fougere, and 20 guest authors. The section “Historical Relationship between Plants and Animals” is fascinating and includes chapters clearly explaining traditional Chinese medicine and Ayurvedic (East Indian) medicine. The authors have included a section titled Herbal Medicine Controversies, in which research, quality control, regulations, and even counter-arguments are discussed. The section on plants provides the background information to the use of herbs therapeutically. This includes medical botany, plant biochemistry, toxicity, and drug interactions (with useful descriptions and tables). Both the diagnoses and the herb selection process are clearly explained. Fougere and Wynn follow up with practical and essential (but often omitted) information about the various forms that herbal medicines come in, along with dosage and dosing, and drug interactions. There are also chapters about purity and concentrations, manufacturing processes, gardening and preserving our world plant biodiversity. One of the issues with traditional native, Indian/Ayurvedic and Chinese medicine is that, often, they do not incorporate recent (within the last 200 y) information about biochemistry, physiology, pathophysiology, and disease-causing factors. Scientific medicine is integrated into this text, especially in the section “Veterinary Clinical Uses of Medicinal Plants.” Fougere discusses this dilemma as she describes the various approaches to prescribing herbs, especially in chronic conditions: “herbalism is vitalistic and holistic in its approach.” She places a Western medical diagnosis within the herbal medicinal frame of reference, this is within the “context of the much bigger picture of the individual patient...it’s mental, emotional and physical experience.” This includes the patient’s diet, exercise, and environment in addition to the disease process and secondary imbalances. The aim it to not only treat the cause of the problem but to reverse the abnormal signs and to restore the health and vitality of the patient. The chapter on a systems-based approach to veterinary herbal medicine is a model of evidence-based logic, clarity, and practical advice, even for the herbal newcomer. Wynn and Fougere incorporate physiology, the latest information on immunity, disease etiology, pathology, and pharmaceuticals. The authors recommend herbs based on their biochemical activity rather than on traditional Chinese medicine principles. This extensive chapter, with its emphasis on dogs and cats, is followed by chapters on equine practice and dairy cows, including relevant materia medica. Wynn and Fougere have thoughtfully included a chapter on getting started, in which they make many useful and practical suggestions for veterinarians venturing into this field. These include sources of information, pricing, patient selection, dispensing advice, and how to have fun doing it all. In the Appendix titled “Suppliers,” Canadian companies are listed. The index is not extensive, but it is clear. In conclusion, this is an essential reference for veterinarians who want to help their patients by using herbal medicine: clear, comprehensive, and practical.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".