The Complementary and Alternative Medicine service at the University’s Small Animal Clinic in St. Paul is full of patients.

The clinic’s director treats ‘2,000 pets a year with acupuncture, diet and an apothecary of herbs with names such as Rising Courage Tea, while she supervises veterinary med students on two-week Oriental medicine rotations.’
The vet has a doctorate and a master’s degree in veterinary microbiology and pathobiology, as well as extensive training in Korea, China and the United States.
She diagnoses and treats the pet’s chi with acupuncture just as an acupuncturist might with a human patient.
It appears that in addition to sharing a huge percentage of genes with our pets, we also share the phenomenon of chi.
Actually, I’ve puzzling over ways to explain the “energy” in “energy healing” in sufficiently acceptable to terms to someone who only accepts material (not spiritual) reality and maintains that there is no such thing. I finally came across Cesar Millan’s new book, outlining what he does as the ‘dog whisperer.’ He writes that humans need connection to nature, no matter how much we wall ourselves up in cities drinking espresso and obssessively checking our Blackberries. Pets gives us access to that primeval side of us.
How does he communicate so effectively with troubled pets, moving quickly into mastery of his non-verbal ‘dog psychology?’
It’s simply. He says he works with the dog’s “energy” — and the human’s. Your dog picks up whether you’re alpha in the pack or have abdicated your leadership role to your pet … the latter leading to unwanted behavioral problems.
It’s a lot easier to explain that way than to try to hypothesize a mechanism of action, or find some way to dub a materialistic perspective over a spiritualized one.
Dogs probably understand “energy” much better than we do – and scientists who have dogs as members of their household probably understand “energy” much better than the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) can explain “biofields” or “frontier medicine.”
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Law Offices of Michael H. Cohen offers general corporate legal services, litigation consultation, and expertise in health law with a unique focus on alternative, complementary, and integrative medical therapies.

Michael H. Cohen is Principal in Law Offices of Michael H. Cohen and also President of the Institute for Integrative and Energy Medicine (also known as the Institute for Health, Ethics, Law, Policy & Society), a forum for exploration of legal, regulatory, ethical, and health policy issues involved in the judicious integration of complementary and alternative medical therapies (such as acupuncture and traditional oriental medicine, chiropractic, massage therapy, herbal medicine) and conventional clinical care. The most recent published book by Michael H. Cohen on health care law, regulation, ethics and policy pertaining to complementary, alternative and integrative medicine and related fields is Healing at the Borderland of Medicine and Religion. This is the fourth book in a series, following Complementary and Alternative Medicine: Legal Boundaries and Regulatory Perspectives (1998), Beyond Complementary Medicine: Legal and Ethical Perspectives on Health Care and Human Evolution (2000), and Future Medicine: Ethical Dilemmas, Regulatory Challenges, and Therapeutic Pathways to Health Care and Healing in Human Transformation (2003).
Michael H. Cohen has also been admitted to the Bar of England and Wales as a Solicitor (non-practicing), adding to Bar membership in four U.S. states.
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