Vet Testimonial: Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney, DVM

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Dr. Kathy Johnson-Delaney regarding Apocaps

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James Jacobson: Well, there we are. We are recording Kathy. OK, so first question that I start off with. Tell me you name and where you are.

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: OK. My name is Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney. I am a Diplomate of the American Board of Practitioners in Avian Practice and I’m at the Eastside Avian and Exotic Animal Medical Center in Kirkland, Washington.

James: OK, thank you. And you have been using our supplement with some of the animals that you are treating with cancer. Tell me about that experience.

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: So far we have been using it in a hedgehog that has squamous cell carcinoma of the mouth. We have been using it now since I believe early November.

This is a tumor that is fairly common in hedgehogs in our little tellerex which is the African pigme hedgehog. it’s a fairly common fast growing tumor which usually they last maybe a month or so after it is discovered because they quit eating and they bleed.

She was discovered at the end of October and we started on her on what I believe is your Formula two, but we started her on that at what I figured out was the dosage scaled down from your dog dose, twice a day, five days on, five days off.

And within 30 days the tumor had regressed to the point where it still looks a little wrong in her mouth but it’s back to fairly normal size. The gums, her teeth have firmed up. She has had no more oral bleeding and no pain and she is doing really well.

Even to this day. I am going to be seeing her again in about three days. Normally with this type of tumor she would have been dead before Christmas.

James: Say that last part again.

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: She would have been dead before Christmas.

James: Wow.

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: It’s worked really well. And the owner is just excited because when we made this diagnosis she had just lost another hedgehog to the same thing. This hedgehog is almost three years old which is getting very old for a heavy.

She had just literally just literally lost another one to the same thing. And so she was prepared for saying goodbye maybe even before Thanksgiving and instead the hedgehog is still with us, doing fine.

James: Wow. You are considered pretty eminent in your field. Have you ever encountered anything like this that has worked with that type of tumor?

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: No I haven’t had anything else that has worked. We have done all sorts of palliative thing and most owners can’t do. You can debulk the tumor. Getting medications into hedgehogs is problematic at best. Very few types of traditional chemotherapy work on squamous cells in the jaw.

And doing radiation therapy just really is not something that most owners are going to undertake, especially since this is a little 200 gram hedgehog, geriatric little hedgehog who you are going to have to give her a sedative to be able to get her unrolled. They are not the easiest little critters to work with and even medications, even doing an exam on them.

James: I imagine they are a little squirmy.

Kathy: No, they just roll up into tight balls. You can’t see anything.

James: [laughter]

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: And then you wear gloves because they prickle you so.

James: [laughter] The challenging animal.

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: Yes, but this has worked really well. I have lost one of my own hedgehogs to this same thing and believe me, I have tried everything else. So we are very pleased. That one is very noticeable and I have sent Dr. Dressler some pictures from that one. I will be taking some more pictures, hopefully this Saturday of that little hedgehog.

We have been trying it in a number of different ferrets. Ferrets have the highest tumor rate of just about any mammal on the planet.

James: What kind of tumors in ferrets?

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: Everything. The most common tumor that we probably have been trying to treat with it, because we don’t have much choice are different lymphomas, lymphosarcomas at various stages and in most of them we have gotten some just, I don’t want to say remission, what I would say is decrease in the clinical symptoms for some period of time.

It held it in a status quo type situation. We had one ferret that did remarkably well, had a thorasic mass of lymphosarcoma. The ferret was presented in early December because of not being able to breathe because the chest was so full of tumor.

We put him on it and the tumor shrunk enough that the ferret could breathe again without hearing him from across the room and he made it to last week when it just got out of control again.

James: And what would the prognosis have been had he not had it?

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: We were expecting to euthanize him that day.

James: Yeah.

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: When he was first presented.

James: So how long.

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: Three months.

James: He got three months that he would not expect.

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: Well three almost four months. Yeah. We have another ferret that has a tumor, has a fibrosarcoma that is usually very aggressive and quite nasty right above his eye. I have debulked it a couple of times. Normally, these types of tumors take over the ferret’s head within two or three months and we lose them. That ferret we have been treating now for six months with it.

James: Six months.

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: It slowed the growth tremendously from the measurements and things that that I have been taking. And again, the experience with this type of mass on the ferret is they are usually fairly rapidly growing, and they basically invade the skull and they take over.

James: So give me a baseline as a layperson also to share with veterinarians. Normally when a ferret has this type of tumor, how quickly does it grow that it would basically [cross talk]?

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: Well again, it’s ballpark. When you start with these you never know how invasive. You don’t know the stage of tumor that it is. But most of the time you give the owners maximum of two to three months before we’ve got it invading the skull.

James: So it would be six months [cross talk].

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: This ferret is at six months and it has not invaded the bone at this point. I have done the same type of debulking surgery that I would have done anyway to make the ferret more comfortable.

But he is doing really well and we have not had to enucleate the eye which was a surprise. Usually the eye gets taken over as well and in this case it hasn’t. It’s not visual anymore but the eyeball is still there.

James Jacobson: Other than the debulking surgery.

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: There’s not much you can do.

James: Can anything help?

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: No, again, there is no chemo that works on those types of tumors. If we have [inaudible] it probably would be the thing of choice for the fibrosarcoma or radiation therapy which again, because of the ferret’s size, is not really an option.

I mean we are dealing with an animal that weighs 800 grams and that’s smaller than most puppies and kittens. So a lot of what we end up having to do with my patients which are mostly very small, we don’t have some of the options that even the oncology people do for large dogs and cats. Can’t do it.

James: What would you say about the supplement to other veterinarians?

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: I would say that it would be worth a try. We have seen no adverse effects except in a couple of ferrets it has given them a little bit of loose stool but ferrets have that anyway.

When you have got a type of like a squamous cell or a fibrosarcoma that is not amenable really to any of the other traditional therapies, especially if it is presented in a fairly advanced condition, you might be able to buy the animal some comfort time and some time of feeling good.

And that’s the other thing is that the ferrets that we have put on this medication, while they are on it, they feel better.

James: Feel better?

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: Yeah. They play. They are feeling back to normal. So the owner in all cases said they feel it is providing comfort time, that it is providing good quality of life. They know that eventually the tumor is going to be out of control, but temporarily it has given them a little bit more time.

James: How surprised are you that a supplement that is basically composed of all natural, generally accepted or generally regarded as safe ingredients is getting this kind of results?

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: To tell you the truth, I am not surprised at all because I have been using some nutraceutical formulations of my own for cardiac work and have had some very demonstrable results using things like the Omega 3s and Co‑Q10 and a number of them and having studied a lot of the nutraceutical and the herbal things and also from having worked in the pharmaceutical industry.

I was an attending veterinarian at a preclinical tox farm contract facility for a number of years.

There’s a lot out there that are chemicals that have actions that are not something that the FDA, that the pharmaceutical companies what to deal with because they are “natural chemicals.” Let’s face it they are not going to make the huge profits off of it that they are on their other drugs.

So these things are slipping through the cracks. And they are just as effective, but they are not something that is going to get regulated and advertised on the evening news.

James: Wow. So…

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: [laughter] Having worked in the pharmaceutical stuff I can tell you.

James: Political.

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: Yeah, that’s the way it works. That’s the whole way that this stuff goes on.

James: So if you were talking to a very conservative veterinarian who basically went by the book, what ammunition would you give us? What would you tell them or at least them to open up to the possibility?

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: The usual way that I do this and I’ve taught several classes in the use of nutraceuticals and herbals. In fact, I am going to be teaching another master class at this coming year’s Association of Avian Veterinarians Conference, a master class in nutraceuticals and using them in pet birds along with Dr. Susan Oros.

The way that we usually start with it is first of all to define nutraceuticals and herbals not being the energized water but being chemistry, being actual natural pharmaceuticals. We get them on a ground level of OK, you know about Co Q10. You know about chondroitin sulfate glucosamine and the effects that, that has in joints. That’s pretty mainstream now.

So we usually start with comparing it with some of the thing they use all the time, vitamin complexes and this kind of thing. And then we work into some of these mechanisms which have been through good science have been proven to work in the control studies and then we build on that.

But we approach it from the way they are used to learning about pharmaceutical or therapeutic action, what it is, what it does, why it is worth trying and putting it back into the realm of the way they learned pharmacology, which essentially it is once you define that it is just a chemical that is derived from a plant that can’t be patented.

And then it throws this into this thing that our FDA does not regulate, however, I use as my base for my cardiac formula, my cardiac stuff, a product from Usana that, it is certified by Australian and Canadian FDAs essentially. We don’t regulate it here, but elsewhere in the world these things are regulated.

James: Correct [cross talk]

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: I respect the Australians and I respect the Canadians. And it’s an inconsistency in our government operation. It has nothing to do with efficacy and what really should be available for therapeutic.

So once we get on that thing, even the most skeptical of veterinarians because everybody uses a Vitamin B Complex injectable and Vitamin K, you basically have their ear. It’s not so foreign to them once you define it.

James: Thank you. Any last words that you would like to share, that we can share with other veterinarians about this?

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: So far we have not seen any adverse affects. And again, I have been taking hematocrits and looking for affects on the white blood cell counts and even some of the liver enzymes. We have seen nothing, no adverse affects on any of these.

And for the owners that are willing to try it, it does give them a little hope, and it definitely is I think making some difference in the quality of life for the animal, which is all we can do sometimes with the cancer therapy.

James: Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney thank you so much. I really appreciate your time. It’s wonderful and do I have your permission to share this with other veterinarians?

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: Sure.

James: OK.

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: Sure.

James: Awesome. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: OK.

James: Thank you so much.

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: Well, thank you. We are still taking pictures and I’m keeping track of things.

James: Keep sending pictures to Demian. We will put them out.

Dr. Kathy Johnson‑Delaney: OK, thank you. Bye‑bye.