From Gaylon TeSlaa, DVM
There's a line I've been saying half-jokingly to clients for over forty years now, and I always watch their faces with great interest when I deliver it.
The time comes when enough evidence to deliver a diagnosis has arrived, and before I've even finished explaining it, the owner nods and says, “Oh—I take medication for that myself.” This sort of situation has happened so often, starting so early in my career—in a small farming community where I took my first job out of school—that I started responding to their replies, “Well, I suppose this runs in the family then.”
Nobody in veterinary school had ever mentioned this. For a while, I filed it away the way anyone would—shared homes, shared habits, shared diets. Nothing mysterious about that.
Then a dog came in with a tumor I'd been told I'd probably never actually see in practice—rare enough that finding it felt like a genuine clinical event. The owner's question changed how I thought about my work permanently: would her dog need the same treatment she was already scheduled to receive herself…for the same disease?
Beyond that supposed “coincidence”, here's what no one contemplates in the moment, and what I've spent the decades revisiting: that tumor didn't appear the week the dog started showing symptoms. It had been growing, quietly, for a long time before anything looked amiss. What brought the dog through our door was the moment those symptoms could no longer be ignored. The real story, the one that actually mattered, had been unfolding, mostly invisibly, for a long time.
Those are the patterns most clinicians recognize so frequently: the underlying disease itself is rarely the recognized crisis. The real issue is how long problems either go unrecognized or unaddressed. Almost every chronic condition I've ever treated showed up first dressed as something acute—a sudden symptom, a bad day, an escalation affirming that no dose of hopium could suppress disease refusing to go away on its own. But underneath nearly every one of those “sudden” presentations was a slow story that had been quietly writing itself for months or years, made up of small things that got waved off as insignificant, again and again.
There's a reason these patterns repeat themselves constantly. Dis-ease, in its oldest and most literal sense, is a loss of ease—a dissonance in the system, a compromise in the peace and harmony the body was designed to operate under. Finding the real origin of that dissonance, biological or not, means taking seriously the influences most visits don't have room for: a subtle nutritional deficiency, an unaddressed emotional stress, an environmental exposure nobody thought to ask about. These finer points are almost never negligible. They are often exactly what's inciting or perpetuating the disease. And they cannot realistically be uncovered in a seven or fifteen minute visit. That failure isn't anyone's fault, and it isn't an accident either—it's what happens when a system built for efficiency and throughput is asked to do work that actually requires comprehensive, individualized understanding. Those are two different jobs, and only one of them fits inside a fifteen-minute appointment slot.
So I went looking elsewhere. My research over the years has taken me around the world, across disciplines that don't usually speak to each other—but the piece I'm proudest of is a kind of role reversal most people never think to make. Science has spent a century studying laboratory animals to better understand human disease. I've spent my career asking the opposite question: what does the vast, accumulated weight of human research and clinical investigation have to teach us about solving problems in animals? Nearly every solution I've found for a genuinely difficult case has come from following that thread backward—taking findings meant for human medicine and asking what they might mean for the patient actually in front of me.
Learning to see all of this—the forest, not just the tree in front of you—has been the actual skill of my career. Not any single diagnosis, not any one remedy. The skill of recognizing the quiet signals before they become the loud ones, and of refusing to stop asking “why” at the first answer that's merely convenient.
Here is the part of my career that has been hardest to sit with, and it isn't the cases I couldn't solve. It's the ones I could. I have lost count of how many times I found the real, addressable cause of a case—a path that could have produced a genuinely transformative recovery—and watched it fail anyway. Not because the science was wrong. Because the client couldn't fully hear it, or accept what it actually asked of them. I built and proved supplement formulas of my own over the years, confident in what they could do, and still watched compliance quietly collapse, again and again, because a bottle handed over without the understanding behind it was never going to hold up against everything working against it in daily life—diet, environment, habit, mindset, all of it. Selling something that works for a while and then loses ground to everything still working against it never sat right with me. It still doesn't.
I kept waiting for someone to build the thing that was actually missing. Not another supplement line. An operating system—a way for veterinarians and the people who trust them to navigate disease together, with real understanding and elevated expectations, instead of settling, visit after visit, for managing what's visible on the surface. Early in my career, I had the privilege of working alongside Dr. W. Jean Dodds, a world-class veterinary hematologist and endocrinologist whose own path—founding Hemopet, and now teaching courses directly to veterinarians—showed me one version of what taking this seriously could look like. My own calling, I surmise, might run a little wider: not reaching practitioners first, but better enabling the pet owners who trust them, publicly, at scale, and maybe influencing the profession itself eventually.
Because here is what decades in this field have shown me: there are plenty of veterinarians who already see exactly what I see. They are not the problem. Most of them are working inside a system—increasingly corporate, increasingly protocol-driven—that leaves little room to practice the way they'd actually choose to if they could. Appealing to that system from the inside was never going to be fast enough. But educating the people that system serves—one pet owner, then a dozen, then a hundred, who finally understand what real causation-based thinking looks like—has the potential to pull the whole profession toward something better, from the ground up. That's the actual design behind BMNF. Not a product. A slow, patient shift in what an entire community of pet owners comes to expect, and what they might increasingly refuse to settle for.
That's what BMNF is actually for. Not a faster answer, and not a shortcut around the doctor's office—a different kind of standard entirely, one built on the belief that better thinking isn't a technique you pick up in an afternoon. It's a lifestyle, and lifestyles are never upgraded alone—they're upgraded inside communities that share the same goals and hold each other to the same standard of understanding. That's what we're building here: a community that reaches for skill and understanding well beyond any single veterinary visit, in collaboration with people and disciplines far outside our own field—while staying exactly, unambiguously clear about what BMNF can and cannot offer you directly.
I am not a physician, and I have no intention of ever becoming one. Everything I teach comes from veterinary medicine, built on veterinary training, applied to veterinary patients. The stories I'll share here are mostly about my personal experiences and cases, often stories about specific animals, and almost always expanding the context window of understanding to look past the acute moment toward the story lying underneath.
There's a version of this work I'm just now stepping into that I want to be honest with you about, because honesty is the whole point. For most of my career, I've had exactly one kind of audience: a client, standing in front of me, asking me directly what I think. That's an intimate, forgiving space. What I'm building here is different—a public one, and public spaces are far less forgiving of the nuance this kind of thinking actually requires.
I'm not coming into this without something to stand on. Four decades of cases, both the successes and failures give me what I can only call a deep reservoir of hard-earned judgment. Increasingly, that judgment lines up with what a growing number of courageous, careful researchers are revealing from the human field as well, often working against the same institutional inertia I've spent my career navigating. Some of the best conversations I've ever had—and some of the best I hope to have publicly—have been with people doing exactly that work, in disciplines that have nothing to do with veterinary medicine on the surface, and everything to do with it underneath.
What I'm actually offering here isn't a settled body of easy answers. It's an invitation to look, comparatively, at what happens when you take the same disciplined, causation-first thinking and point it at a different species—and to notice how much of it translates. I won't pretend that's without cost. The moment real thinking becomes public, it becomes a target for people who have no context for how it was earned, and every reason to reduce it to something simpler and easier to dismiss. I expect that, and I'm choosing it anyway, because the alternative—keeping four decades of hard lessons private, available only to the people who happen to find their way into my practice—has never sat right with me. Some of what I know best, I learned from cases that didn't go the way I hoped. I don't intend to edit those out of the story.
One last thing, because I think it matters more than anything else I could put on this page. BMNF is not a business I'm building with an exit strategy. At a time when a majority of my veterinary classmates are retiring (or are already retired), I find myself energized because of the amazing, unprecedented access to new, game-changing information and technology. That's not a marketing line—it's a structural fact of what this actually is, and hanging things up just when things are getting exciting isn't part of my plan. What I'm building isn't a repeatable process that happens to carry my name. It's what I believe what many will find to be specific, irreplaceable ways of thinking, made available to a community willing to think that way alongside me.
So consider this your invitation—and I don't mean that gently. Stop settling for symptoms managed instead of causes found. Stop accepting “it's just old age” or “that's just how they are” as an answer, when it's really just a question nobody has asked yet. Level up. Aim higher—for the animal in front of you, and don't be surprised if, somewhere along the way, you find yourself better equipped and aware in thinking through some of your own health challenges.
That's the invitation. Never stop learning OR asking questions!
Founder, Better Medicine Naturally Foundation
Aim Higher.