Can I tell you about the scariest, most wonderful hour of my October?
I was recently invited to give a lecture at a large veterinary conference in Nevada. It was not a holistic gathering, but a mainstream one, a room full of conventional veterinarians. It was my first time speaking at a conference like that, and I will be honest with you: I was nervous. These are the colleagues I most wanted to reach, and the ones I least knew how my message would land with.
I opened my talk with a question. “How many of you have run a microbiome test on a patient?”
In a room of about two hundred veterinarians, three or four hands went up.
Then I asked who had ever performed microbiome restoration therapy, the gentle procedure where we rebuild a damaged gut ecosystem with a healthy microbial community.
Two hands. Out of two hundred.
I want to sit with that number for a moment, because of what it means for you.
That procedure, the one nearly everyone in that room had never done, is a cornerstone of how we practice at IPWC. It is how my first patient, a German Shepherd, finally got relief after years of relapsing diarrhea. It is part of how my own puppy went from a fragile gut to a resilient one. It is the quiet engine behind so many of the recoveries you’ve read about here. What feels routine inside our walls is, in most of veterinary medicine, still very rare.
So for the next hour, I showed them why we do it. The science of the gut as an ecosystem: not one missing bug, but a whole community that talks to the skin, the immune system, even the kidneys and the brain. The published evidence. Our own results: of our chronic patients who came back for follow-up testing, about seven in ten improved, many of them the “nothing else worked” cases. And the procedure itself: no sedation, no anesthesia, just minutes of a pet’s time, gentle enough to repeat weekly.
Near the end, I asked the room one more question. “Who here feels like they could see themselves trying this?”
About eighty percent of the hands went up.
You see, that is the part I keep replaying. Not my slides, not my nerves. A room full of skeptical, conventionally trained veterinarians, good doctors, the kind who want evidence before they move, changed their minds in a single hour. Because the idea is simple. The science is solid. And the changes this medicine makes possible can be remarkable.
If a vet ever told you there was nothing more to try for your pet, I hope this gives you what it gave that room: a very good reason to stay curious.
The tide I keep telling you about isn’t coming anymore. I watched it arrive, one raised hand at a time.
Give your sweet ones a scratch from me.
Dr. Lily
Curious whether microbiome testing could help your pet? Send us an email at info@integrativepet.com
