Colleagues Cringe, but Vet’s Patients Give Tails Up

Like most people who end up at Smith Ridge Veterinary Center, actress Louise Lasser arrived desperate, with an aching heart and a dying dog.

The tumor she’d had removed from the mouth of her 16-year-old Yorkshire terrier, Pushky--”My baby! My husband!”--had come back. Short of radiation, which Lasser rejected, conventional medicine offered little. Her only hope was a miracle.

Dr. Martin Goldstein, whose name Lasser had pried out of Pushky’s reluctant oncologist, practices alternative veterinary medicine in a cramped, shabby building an hour’s drive north of Manhattan.

“Oh, my God,” Lasser thought. “It’s a shack.”

As clinics go, Smith Ridge doesn’t inspire much confidence. But no one comes here for the ambience.

This is where you go if your Rottweiler suffers explosive diarrhea and drops 50 pounds practically overnight, as Whiskey Pincus did recently, or your Lhasa apso develops a spinal cord tumor, as did Lucky Swedenburg, who fell down one day and never got up.

This is where you go if your vet recommends putting your 11-year-old paralyzed poodle-and-something to sleep. Instead, like Donna Anderson, you scoop him up in your arms and you get the hell out of there. “If he had been in pain, yes, I would have to,” she said. “But he wasn’t.”

Back home with Snoopy in her lap, “I cried my brains out.”

Then she picked up the phone and called Marty Goldstein.

They come from all over, expecting a New Age healer. Instead, they get “Dr. Marty,” a borscht-belt comic in boat shoes, a 49-year-old fast talker in a dog-patterned shirt.

Lasser was still sizing him up when Pushky stood on his hind legs, placed his paws on Dr. Marty’s shoulders and began fervently licking his face.

“I was so surprised, I can’t tell you,” said Lasser, sounding remarkably like her old TV character, Mary Hartman. “He never shook, and Pushky’s a shaker. He was scared of everything in his life. But somehow, he knew this man was going to help him.”

That was 16 months ago, and Pushky is still going strong, his cancer in remission after a series of injections and supplements to strengthen his immune system, a treatment Goldstein’s critics contend has no scientific validity.

Another of Dr. Marty’s miracles, says the staff, who preside with compassion and humor over a waiting room that sometimes resembles an animal version of Lourdes. No cat goes unpetted, no dog unloved, not even the reeking retriever whose muzzle has swollen grotesquely like a football.

As with animals treated conventionally, some of Goldstein’s patients, like the retriever, don’t make it. But some do. Goldstein estimates it’s about 50-50, not counting the most hopeless cases. Making it, in this case, means surviving at least six months, although some live for years.

Pictures of the animals the staff call Marty’s miracles cover the walls at Smith Ridge. There’s Whiskey the Rottweiler at 63 pounds, the embodiment of misery with every vertebra visible through the dull fur; Jupiter the cat, blinded by a brain tumor, his eyes milky and opaque; Blake the terrier, his fur gone and his skin blackened by allergies to grass, fleas and rugs.

All were saved by alternative treatments after conventional medicine failed, Goldstein says: Whiskey by vitamins, organ concentrates and a diet of boiled vegetables and meats; Jupiter by injections of immune components; Blake by nutritional supplements and homeopathic remedies.

The “after” pictures show Whiskey at 130 pounds, a show-stopper who recently thwarted a robbery at his owner’s computer store and starred in a commercial for blue jeans; Jupiter, his vision restored and his eyes sparkling with feline curiosity; Blake, lying seductively on the same rug that once made his fur fall out, sporting a new coat of downy white fluff.

Impressive as they are, before-and-after pictures hold no sway with scientists. Dr. Franklin Loew, dean of the College of Veterinary Medicine at Cornell University, Goldstein’s alma mater, likens his documentation to that of “the Hair Club for Men.”

“I don’t doubt the enthusiastic reports I get one bit,” Loew says. “But I don’t know how many animals didn’t respond.”

Dr. Martin DeAngelis, a veterinary surgeon in Ardsley, N.Y., who sometimes refers cancer patients to Goldstein, considers him a pioneer who “truly believes in what he’s doing, who loves the people and the animals and who has bettered the profession by expanding our view of what healing is about.”

But he acknowledges that’s not the prevailing view.

“Many vets think he’s a quack, a wacko; they give him no respect,” DeAngelis said. “A lot truly hate him and talk about him and would do injury to him professionally if they could.”

Goldstein is well aware of this. “I don’t blame anyone for anything that comes against me,” he said. “This is a path I chose to take.”

Besides, it was much worse a decade ago, when he addressed the regional veterinary society and part of his audience walked out.

For years, DeAngelis and others have tried to persuade Goldstein to document his work. By failing to do so, they say, he’s consigning himself to the fringes of a profession he’s risked his reputation to change.

“It’s my goal in life to get my cases documented,” said Goldstein, who dreams of building a research center and teaching. But at the moment, he said, he’s too busy trying to save lives to compile data.

Instead, he takes pictures.

He also surrounds himself with great quotations, comforting thoughts on nonconformity to be shared with his clients:

“Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds”--Einstein.

And:

“Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood”--Emerson.

Those are for newcomers.

Veterans get more hard-core stuff:

“If we could launder the word ‘cancer,’

“hang it out in the sun to dry

“and bring it in bleached white and beautiful,

“I promise you there would be less cancer

“and less death from it.

“Souls would find other ways . . . “ --Pat Rodegast.

****

With the client busy reading, Goldstein turns to the dog lying despondently on the table and cuffs him one under the chin.

The owner is horrified: What’s he doing? Is he crazy?

But by now, it’s too late. The tail’s started to twitch. Dr. Marty goes into his shtick, talking silly, rubbing the muzzle, giving the dog a few noogies on the head.

The tail-wagging intensifies: thump, Thump, THUMP! It’s been ages since anyone did this; since the diagnosis, it’s been all doom and gloom. The dog grins; the owner does too.

The hopelessness starts to fade.

Goldstein’s tone turns triumphant: “Look at that spirit! We have a lot to work with here!”

Next, he hauls out the scrapbooks, brimming with hopeless cases he managed to turn around, like Lucky Swedenburg, who now wears a diaper but otherwise seems to be fine.

Eventually, client and patient go home loaded with jars and syringes to begin the task not of fighting the cancer, but of supporting the immune system so the body can fight on its own.

The centerpiece of Goldstein’s cancer-fighting program, Immune-Augmentative Therapy, consists of naturally isolated immune components from healthy patients injected under the skin of sick ones to enhance their immune systems. The formula varies based on tumor type and on periodic analysis of patients’ blood.

IAT is based on the human cancer work of the late Dr. Lawrence Burton, who moved to the Bahamas in 1977, having failed to convince the Food and Drug Administration, the National Cancer Institute and others.

He did, however, convince Goldstein’s brother, Robert, also a veterinarian, who founded Smith Ridge in 1982. Marty joined him two years later and took over when Robert left to develop a health food for pets. He now owns a health food store for animals and publishes a national newsletter for pet owners.

The original Smith Ridge was squeezed into a tiny space leased from a kennel. “My exam room was my surgery; plumbing pipes hung from the ceiling,” Marty said.

He was already a believer, having warded off his own burgeoning arthritis with a macrobiotic diet at age 27. His policy of turning no patient away brought him many hopeless cases. But it was an 11-year-old standard poodle named Pinky who taught him “the potential of miracle.”

Pinky came to Smith Ridge after chemotherapy and surgery failed to eradicate his lymph cancer. He’d barely eaten in three weeks, the skin on his face was sloughing off, and he couldn’t defecate without fainting.

Goldstein wanted to put Pinky to sleep, but his owner refused. After 24 hours on IAT, Goldstein says, Pinky’s appetite returned and he stopped fainting. He lived four more years with no evidence of recurrence, having outlasted his cancer-free brother by a year.

Though skeptics still outnumber believers, both agree that alternative practitioners like Goldstein are having an impact on the profession that goes far beyond photographs on the wall.

As word spreads of animals successfully treated with herbs, homeopathy, acupuncture and chiropractic adjustment, interest in alternatives is growing, and with it, the pressure on conventional vets to explore them.

Evidence abounds, in the growing membership of the American Holistic Veterinary Assn., up from a few dozen to more than 500; in the American Veterinary Medical Assn.’s new Committee on Alternative and Complementary Veterinary Medicine; in Cornell’s efforts to raise $5 million to endow a Center for Complementary Medicine.

Today’s alternative methods may be tomorrow’s mainstream medicine, says Dr. Carvell Tiekert, who heads the holistic association and who sits on the AVMA committee. Ultrasound diagnosis and treatment is a case in point. Considered alternative in 1988, it was given conventional status this year.

Alternative medicine’s growing respectability comes at a time when veterinarians of all stripes are seeing an increase in cancers, like the one that struck Snoopy Anderson in his 11th year.

A 25-pound acrobat who took the stairs two at a time and soared over the sofa without touching it, Snoopy tripped over nothing one spring day in 1994. The next day, he fell down the stairs.

An X-ray dye study of Snoopy’s soft tissue revealed an inoperable tumor in his spinal cord. The specialist was sorry. There was nothing she could do.

What is an aging dog’s life worth?

With one black ear and black eyes obscured by a shaggy white coat, Snoopy resembled a miniature sheep dog. His owners guessed him to be part poodle, part Bichon Frise.

He was all heart, a cuddler who begged not for treats but for kisses; an expert at hide-and-seek; a chaser of squirrels and a lover of people; a mutt like millions of others; to the family who loved him, he was unlike any creature that had ever lived.

This is what Snoopy’s life was worth to the Andersons:

For seven months, they gave him eight daily injections, one every hour from 8 to 11, morning and night. Donna, a beauty consultant for a cosmetics company, gave the morning shots. Robert, a teacher, handled nights.

When he could no longer walk, they made a sling from a canvas wood carrier and walked him around the yard in it whenever he cried.

They coaxed him with cookies and cajoled him with imaginary cat sightings, trying to get him to walk. They did this outside with the video camera rolling, to capture the miracle on tape.

Snoopy endured bouts of bloody diarrhea. He dropped from 25 pounds to 14. But each time Donna brought him in for his blood work, “Marty was so positive, he kept me going.” Goldstein now admits he was faking. “The truth is, I would have bet $100,000 that dog would never walk again,” he said.

In January 1995, Snoopy completed the IAT program. A month later, his blood tested perfectly. The staff at Smith Ridge was ecstatic. “Another of Dr. Marty’s miracles,” a worker said.

It was hard for Donna to share their excitement. “I felt bitter. I thought, ‘If it’s such a miracle, why isn’t he walking?’ ” But by the next day, she was back outside with her camera, trying to get Snoopy to walk.

The final scene on the Andersons’ videotape was filmed on April 23, 1995. It shows a shaggy white dog with one black ear running through green grass, grinning wildly.

Snoopy Anderson has been chasing squirrels ever since.