The Power of Medicinal Mushrooms: Enhancing Pet Wellness with Dr. Rob Silver

Ever wondered about the mysteries that the humble mushroom holds and how it could possibly revolutionize your pet's health? In this chat with renowned integrative veterinarian Dr. Rob Silver we unearth the wonders of medicinal mushrooms.  From their historical and contemporary use to their potential in fighting ailments like cancer, cognitive decline and anxiety . This episode is really a treasure of valuable information.

Dr. Robert J. Silver is a 1982 graduate of Colorado State University’s College of Veterinary Medicine. He has pioneered the use of diet, herbs and nutraceuticals in his small animal integrative practice in Boulder, Colorado for the past 25 years. He writes and speaks both domestically and internationally to veterinary audiences on the value of blending holistic modalities with conventional medicine, and is a consultant to the pet food industry. He is also the Chief Medical Officer of Real Mushrooms for Pets.


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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Dogs make the best companions for humans. This podcast aims to help make humans better companions for their dogs. Welcome to the Baroo Podcast, a modern lifestyle podcast for dogs and their people. I'm your host, charlotte Bain. I've been caring for other people's dogs for more than 15 years and, while I've learned a lot in my career, I definitely don't know at all. So I've collected an ever-evolving roster of amazing dog people and I learn new things from them all the time. Hi you guys. Thank you so much for joining me for this episode of the Baroo Podcast. In today's episode, renowned integrated veterinarian, dr Rob Silver, joins me to discuss the healing powers of mushrooms, from their historical and contemporary use to their potential in fighting ailments like cancer, cognitive decline and anxiety in our pets, just to name a few. This episode is really a treasure of valuable information, so let's just jump right into the chat. Well, thank you so much for jumping on and chatting with me. I really appreciate it. Medicinal mushrooms is something that I know nothing about.

Speaker 2: 1:32

Yeah, no, most people don't know anything about medicinal mushrooms. That's my job to explain that information and I've gotten pretty good at it. Yeah, let me go. Let me add it Good.

Speaker 1: 1:47

There's definitely a bled in the human health and wellness space around the use of medicinal mushrooms for our own health and I assume it transfers to our pets in much the same way, right?

Speaker 2: 2:00

It does, and in fact, the buzz is also starting to build up volume within the pet space as well, because, as you know, pet parents want to give their four-legged family members the same benefits that they receive themselves from whatever they're doing in their lifestyle Right.

Speaker 1: 2:20

So how did you become passionate about medicinal mushrooms? You're an integrative veterinarian.

Speaker 2: 2:25

I'm an integrative veterinarian. I've had a four years of experience One of the originals, actually I'm an old timer and medicinal mushrooms are another tool, an excellent tool. But it is only recently I would say within the last five to 10 years that good quality products have been available in the marketplace, and so in the absence of the availability of these products, no one can have any experience using them, so we are unable to get more information. Most of the research done into medicinal mushrooms has been with humans or in laboratory animals. In laboratory settings We've got a quarter to two studies with mushrooms and pets, and I can talk about those a little bit. Mostly, when we think about medicinal mushrooms most people, I think the first thing comes to mind is cancer, something for cancer, and mushrooms do have their highest calling for that. But we have been finding a number of really amazing applications for pets for the variety of different medicinal mushrooms we have available. So I've been interested in mushrooms for a long time. The availability of good products is only recent.

Speaker 2: 3:44

But I have expertise in other realms as well. For instance, I'm one of the global experts in pet cannabis use and I have several published chapters in that respect as well. So to me, integrative medicine means taking the best of conventional medicine and blending that with the best of evidence-based alternative medicine, and it's not always the same blend. Each patient has their own needs. Some need more conventional, some need more alternative, and it's really the task of the integrative veterinarian or of the pet parent who is integratively minded, to figure out which is the best blend.

Speaker 2: 4:30

Many pet parents have a bit of a phobia about conventional medicine, about drugs, about, you know, and I share. I don't share a phobia, I share a respect and caution about those and I think that one reason why we've developed these phobias is they've been overused and they've been misused. You know, I think steroids are great if they're used properly, that lower dosages for shorter periods of time unless they're needed, unless we have a terminal kind of a situation, but they tend to get overused and when they're given too much then they get that bad rap. So you know, it's all about the individual animal and what you're doing for them.

Speaker 1: 5:14

As we're talking. You mentioned cancer is one of the kind of foremost things we think about when we're talking about medicinal mushrooms. With that being said, I have a dog that I care for who just had a mast cell tumor removed from his face. He's doing well. He's going to start chemo, and what I'm wondering is how can we utilize medicinal mushrooms to help support him during this process, or how can they be beneficial for that particular dog in situation.

Speaker 2: 5:48

Well, first of all, I'd make the assumption that because the veterinarian feels that the mass cell tumor is aggressive enough that they want to use chemo for that, some mass cell tumors have come in different flavors and some of the flavors are not very aggressive and really don't pose a long term problem or the problem spread. But the highest grade does, and that's the grade that we generally talk about using chemo for, and I think medicinal mushrooms can provide a very good companion to chemotherapy. There's no evidence based on the scientific literature that medicinal mushrooms defeat the effectiveness of chemotherapy, although we don't have information for every single chemo agent and every single mushroom used and every single type of cancerous disease in dogs. But I think it's enough to know that we can be comfortable with them being not just safe, but there are also some studies showing that medicinal mushrooms actually can increase the effectiveness of chemotherapy because of their beta-glucan content, and many types of chemotherapy can actually cause problems with the bone marrow, it can cause anemia, it can cause a reduction in the important white cells that you need to fight the cancer and protect against infections, and the beta-glucan that are in all mushrooms, but in particular in the mushrooms I'm going to describe in just a second also affect the stem cells in the bone marrow and help them to grow more red cells or more white cells. So there's that kind of benefit right then, and there the beta-glucans themselves will stimulate cells of the immune system to be more vigilant to attack the cancer cells, and so we have some studies that show that beta-glucans alone, without the benefit of chemotherapy, cause a reduction in growth of cancer. So there's a really good option right there.

Speaker 2: 7:52

But there's even one other benefit that goes beyond that for mass cells, and that is mass cells are known to be the immune cells of the body that are involved in the release of histamine, and so with mass cell tumors, oftentimes we can get kind of allergy, types of histamine types of responses, oftentimes a lot of redness and tenderness and that sort of stuff. There are two mushrooms which have anti-histaminic properties as well as containing those very valuable beta-glucans that I was just describing my microphone cable keeps getting in my way and those two mushrooms one is called Racial, otherwise known as Ganoderma lucidum that's the botanical name for it, and the other one is called Chaga C-H-A-G-A, and so when those are used, either singly or together, they will help to dampen down any kind of release of histamine from those mass cells. So I think that you know for mass and I'm glad you used this as an example I think that mass cell tumors are very, very good candidates for the use of medicinal mushrooms, specifically those two mushrooms.

Speaker 1: 9:11

So so that's very good news. Yeah, and what is the best way to administer that? Powder form, chew form? Or how do you give medicinal mushrooms?

Speaker 2: 9:23

Well, the company that I'm working with right now that is kind of sponsoring my doing this podcast with you is called Real Mushrooms and they're a Canadian company, and their parent company, namex, has been growing medicinal mushrooms under USDA organic standards for 40 years. Eight years ago, real Mushrooms decided that, instead of just selling these bulk mushroom extracts to other companies to make into retail products, that they would develop their own retail line, which is what we call Real Mushrooms, and so I joined. They've been around for eight years selling their products for humans. I joined them two years ago. I'm a veterinarian. I worked for 25 years with another company developing 40 formulas for veterinary use for a variety of different things.

Speaker 2: 10:16

That company was sold and I've moved on and so I came to Real Mushrooms to develop their pet line, and so in the pet line these mushroom extracts are made into a powder format and they're very concentrated and they analyze them so we know exactly how much, how many beta-glucans they contain, because I've developed a dosing strategy based on the beta-glucan content of the mushroom and the weight of the patient and how severe the problem is. Like a cancer patient would get a much higher dosage than just wellness, you know, or using it just for anti-history, let's say we have seasonal allergies, which would be another place that we want to be a question yeah, which would be another place we'd want to use mushrooms for.

Speaker 2: 11:01

So we might want to use a higher dosage for that, but maybe not as high a dose as we might use for cancer. So these products come as a powder, so you can buy them in bulk pouches, measure them with kitchen teaspoon measurements, just mix it in with the food, because mushrooms are food. You can give them with food and it works well. Or we also put them in two different sizes of capsules. One size is the human size, larger, and the other is a smaller size for pets. The pet products all have the dosing recommendations on their labels.

Speaker 2: 11:35

And then I've also developed two soft chews and one of those soft chews is the soft chew that contains those two mushrooms in it. I call those mushroom immune chews. And another soft chew has a relaxing effect with two mushrooms that have a relaxing benefit for calming, for stress, for those sorts of things. And because the you have a lot of room in a little soft chew, I've also put other herbs and other nutraceuticals in those soft chews to increase their effectiveness. So it's really there's a lot of choices and I'm spending a lot of time reaching out to veterinarians, so your holistic veterinarian will know about our company and know about these products and the advantage that they can offer clinically for them.

Speaker 1: 12:20

Right, that's fantastic. So that brings me to another question. So I have my own dog, chance. He's 15 and he's started to have a little bit of like canine cognition dysfunction and he's also his anxiety is kind of ramping up a little bit. So, as I've read, it's common in senior dogs. I guess, he's geriatric dog at this point, but so the common choose would be something that would be incredibly beneficial to him in that way. Or is there something specific to address the anxiety, because I have so many clients that suffer from anxiety?

Speaker 2: 13:00

No, anxiety is a big thing. I just completed a podcast for the Pet Anxiety Summit that's coming up next month. So, yeah, you know, canine cognitive disorders CCD is what you're describing. You see this in a lot of the elderly patients, dogs and cats as well, and we also. These days it just seems like anxiety is on the rise, but really I'm not surprised.

Speaker 2: 13:25

There is so much going on in the world today that's creating anxiety in humans. I mean all the natural disasters and the political stuff and all that is just really stressful, and pets feel what their parents are feeling and they have their own stressors that they have to deal with as well. So, yeah, so I've got answers for both of those problems that involve, in part, using mushrooms. Now, mushrooms are, you know, they're really a, you know, a super food, a functional food. They're really not drugs, and so I really recommend that, instead of thinking about just taking a mushroom for this problem for these two days or three, that you really need to think more about the bigger picture, what your animal's constitution is and using them on a daily basis, because they work much better the longer they're used, when they're used regularly like that.

Speaker 2: 14:20

So there is one mushroom in particular that we think will work really well for canine cognitive disorder and that mushroom is called lion's mane.

Speaker 1: 14:31

Maybe you've heard of that mushroom I have heard of that, it's the most. That's the one mushroom that I have heard of.

Speaker 2: 14:37

Yes, so the particular mushroom in North America and probably in Europe would be my guess as well because of its ability to improve memory and its ability to treat, to improve cognition, and it's being used to treat certain forms of dementia, including Alzheimer's, if it's they're seeing, they're actually. There's some published studies where in early Alzheimer's the use of lion's mane is showing some improvement, or at least slowing down the progression of it. So lion's mane alone as a mushroom could be a very good mushroom to use. Now I've taken the lion's mane and I blended it with another mushroom called Reishi, which is the same mushroom that I was talking about. That had antihistimidic properties, and Reishi is really. It's considered the mushroom of immortality and probably is the most famous mushroom out there.

Speaker 2: 15:30

In ancient China, peasants would come upon beautiful specimens, huge specimens, of Reishi. They would collect it and take it to the emperor as an offering, because it can be still great honor upon them but it would bestow, hopefully, immortality upon the emperor, and so Reishi extracts are used by Zen masters as a meditation. So I took the Reishi and I combined it with the lion's mane, which also is good for stress and relaxation, but also good for dementia, and Reishi also has some benefits as well for dementia, and I put them together into a soft chew the relax mushroom chews and I added to that tryptophan, which is the amino acid that helps to create more serotonin, and I also added to that theanine. Theanine is an amino acid found in green tea and it's what gives green tea its zen. That's why green tea doesn't get you all jittery.

Speaker 2: 16:35

It's got this theanine in it and then I put some other herbs in there, like catnip and valerian and lemon balm and passion flower, and so it is a very calming and settling soft chew. But for the cognition part the seniors it's really the lion's mane that does the heavy lifting in that formula, and so you could give lion's mane alone. I'm working on a formula for CCD that would have lion's mane and a couple of other herbs in it, like an amino acid like carnitine, for instance, and an herb like ginkgo, which also helps with memory, and so I'm working on that formula and we'll be creating that product as soon as I get the green light to do it.

Speaker 1: 17:36

So are there any like contraindications with using mushrooms?

Speaker 2: 17:39

I know they're a super food, but Any mushrooms that that we shouldn't be giving to our pets, or well and or well, any mushrooms that could be Not good with, like any other supplements that we're giving or something like that right and you know if, if we're not talking about Mushrooms that you might find in the wild which we strongly recommend Eating because of the potential of getting the wrong mushroom that looks like the right mushroom With. You know, with pets there really are very few contraindications, the there are a few animals and a few people that could have some allergies to Mushrooms, particularly. We see that with shiitake. Humans have a shiitake mushroom Interesting, not very common. Um, we've seen in some pets with higher doses of mushrooms a Sensitivity that might develop into some diarrhea. Okay, which is transient and could be corrected by lowering the dosage.

Speaker 2: 18:41

There's really very little published that suggests there's bad interactions. Certainly, if you're on anticoagulant medication, it's always important, no matter what else you're using, to be careful about that, because the the cold clotting issue could be very life-threatening if it's not managed properly. Right, but no, um, there's study show mushrooms work well with chemotherapy. Mushrooms work well with NSAIDs. Some mushrooms have some anti-inflammatory, pain relieving, mobility enhancing properties. Okay, that allows them to be used together with NSAIDs. You know our, our, our remedy ill and our maloxicam and galliprante and all all those new ones We've got out there now too.

Speaker 2: 19:27

So, no, I think mushrooms really are are a great addition to any animals life and any humans life and Giving them the right amount. And if you've got specific conditions, you know, looking at using the right mushroom. What we look, what what you're gonna find commonly in terms of products are, are combinations where you're not just getting a single mushroom but you're getting a blend of maybe five mushrooms, maybe seven mushrooms, maybe three mushrooms, mm-hmm, and there's a great deal of evidence that when they're given together they kind of work synergistically to enhance each other's benefits. And so real mushrooms has a product their single most popular product ever of all time is one they call five Defenders and it has five mushrooms in it, including the reishi and the chaga. So we recommend the five defenders be used with mast cell for that reason and for Allergies. But it also has three other mushrooms, all of which are known for their potency to treat cancer. One is called turkey tail. Maybe you've heard of turkey tail. There was a study.

Speaker 1: 20:39

I have her turkey tail.

Speaker 2: 20:40

Yeah, dogs with he manju sarcoma. That showed some very good results. That first study in 2012 is is really one of the reasons why so many people got interested in using Turkey tail for their pets, whether they're a pet parent or a veterinarian. Their results for this cancer study were surprisingly good, and so turkey tail in many ways was kind of the the Entry level of mushrooms for most pet parents. Many are still using turkey tail and it's a great mushroom, not just for cancer, not just for infectious disease, but also for the microbiome and for many other things.

Speaker 2: 21:19

Mushrooms have a wide variety of effects. It also has shiitake mushroom in it and Shiitake is tasty, as that mushroom is is one of the most widely researched and powerful mushrooms for the treatment of cancer in Asia. There. It's used widely in Asia and their extracts of that that are even made into injectables that are given by physicians to cancer patients concurrently with chemotherapy. And then the fifth mushroom in there is called mitake mushroom, and mitake also has very strong anti cancer properties. One of and and shiitake and mitake are some of the most prized edible mushrooms out there. You know I don't know if you live somewhere where where people do mushroom foraging, but if there's mitake growing wherever you are. It's really a.

Speaker 1: 22:08

Last thing, just what I'm gonna say is I don't know if we do a lot of mushroom foraging here, but you never know.

Speaker 2: 22:14

Yeah, it's. You know it's a southern California and there's some moisture Well, not that much. I know up in the Bay Area up north there's quite a few mushrooms growing further north but Not sure.

Speaker 1: 22:25

Yeah. Yeah, I'm originally from Seattle, so we definitely probably.

Speaker 2: 22:30

Oh yeah, pacific Northwest is a hotbed of mushrooming, for sure.

Speaker 1: 22:35

Yeah, yeah, so is there evidence support that, if we're using this as a supplement or as a nutraceutical On a daily basis, that it can help prevent some of these diseases? Like do we wait until a dog has a mastal tumor to give them mushrooms, or do we use this as something it's preventative or a Dog that's could be prone to cancer or something like a golden retriever, or to be proactive about it, do we give Mushrooms?

Speaker 2: 23:12

I think being proactive is excellent. I mean, to me that's the essence of holistic integrative medicine. We don't have any kind of prevention studies in pets. We don't have a lot of studies in pets, yeah, which is a shame, but I'm sure they'll be coming. But there are.

Speaker 2: 23:30

There are several studies and one in particular, an epidemiological study, in which they followed a population of people in Asia I think is in Asia and followed them over a number of years and then tracked the development of cancer and then measured how many mushrooms they would eat on a daily basis, even things as simple as little white button mushrooms, and they found a substantial prevention and protection against the development of cancer in this population. So I do believe that we do have a preventative effect of mushrooms and that's kind of where this whole dosing thing comes in. So for wellness and prevention we'd use a low dosage every day, every day, every day. We have found that you can train your immune system using mushrooms to be much more vigilant, to be much more ready to find a cancer cell or find an infectious agent and destroy them. So when cancer is just a single cell or two in the body, if the immune system is working, it takes care of that.

Speaker 2: 24:41

Cancer cells are always arising in our bodies through mutations. It's our immune system that eliminates them. So by making the immune system more effective you can help to reduce your chances of it, and these epidemiological studies support that that is true. So, for instance, you could take the five defenders at a much lower dosage. And what's nice about the real mushrooms products is we publish on the label what the actual beta-glucan content is. So I use my formula to compute that. But we also have it in a format that says a capsule for every 20 to 40 pounds of body weight, which is another way of looking at it, and you start with the lower dosage. But when they so, you would do a lower dosage every day and they develop this protective prevention and then, if they were unfortunate enough, even with that prevention, to develop something because poop happens, then you would double or triple the dosage and probably add a few more things in there that are specific for the type of cancer that gets diagnosed.

Speaker 1: 25:54

Okay, okay. You mentioned the studies in Asia and I know that you source your mushrooms for real mushrooms primarily in China is that correct Is? There a reason for this, for those who might understand why you need to outsource to China.

Speaker 2: 26:13

I understand for the pet parent that China is not a favored place to get things from. I practice as a veterinarian through the great pet food recall of 2007. I know I had patients die from that stuff, I know. But China has been developing mushroom technology. They've been using mushrooms since about 3000 BC. 85% of all the mushrooms that are cultivated in the world come from China. They do it the best.

Speaker 2: 26:50

So the founder of this company went to China and started working with those experts and established some growth centers in the highlands, far away from pollution, and also introduced the concept of organic growing to the Chinese, and they've had conferences every year now about growing organic mushrooms in China.

Speaker 2: 27:15

And all the mushrooms that they grow there are triple tested for pesticides and heavy metals and all that stuff to make sure it's a very clean product.

Speaker 2: 27:24

But it is always a bit of a learning curve for me to explain that they come from China, because I have the same kinds of feelings that everybody else does and I had to look at the actual analyses and look at all their manufacturing processes and their growing processes before I became a believer in the quality of these products. And so because Asia and Eastern Europe are probably the two hotbeds of mushroom foraging, of mushroom use for food, culinary uses, but also mushroom use for medicinal uses, and so that's why most of the world scientific literature about mushrooms either comes out of Asia or comes out of Eastern Europe. We're seeing papers coming out of the Czech Republic and out of Hungary, where there's a lot of work being done with mushrooms medicinally. So that's why we refer to that, to Asia and to those studies that we find there. But there's more and more studies now also coming from the US and from Europe, as the entire scientific community is getting interested in looking at mushrooms from a different vantage point.

Speaker 1: 28:41

Right, right. Well, that makes perfect sense. I mean, sometimes we have to check our biases and Of course, you know, in the uncomfortable associations we might have with certain things to get through, to get look at what's best for the pet and for us and for all around, right? So I wanted to just one more thing that you were talking about. You were talking about the microbiome.

Speaker 1: 29:02

Yeah, a little bit ago Not to bring up another dog that I have, but as many of my dogs care for do might. One of the dogs I care for has gut issues. He were very certain at this point. He has IBD, inflammatory bowel disease. It's just kind of gotten so out of control and I'm just Wondering how medicine, medicinal mushrooms can Help benefit the microbiome and such diseases such as a IBD which is, from what I learned, is kind of like IBS, which is like Right now, ibs starts with stress and creates and and develops into kind of a chronic inflammation in the bowel which, if left unchecked then can progress to inflammatory disease.

Speaker 2: 29:51

So you know, I'm, I've, I've always prided myself on my skills in working with digestive problems and and I used to jokingly call myself doctor diarrhea.

Speaker 2: 30:03

So, good at dealing with that stuff. But and so it's a really you know, with digestive problems it's a multi factorial thing, starting with food, you know, starting with the actual food that you're feeding and and many dogs will develop intolerances and sensitivities the foods that can also set up inflammation, the bowel that then goes on to progress to this and that. So. So you know we have to do a lot, a number of different things is not just give a mushroom. They're going to be better, you know right. So you know we start with food. There's so many different herbs, like ginger, which Marshmallow roots, slippery Elm, which could be so good for digestive system process. Of course, adding probiotics is very good these days. I don't know if you've done any looking into fecal transplants and using.

Speaker 2: 30:50

Using like these, either using the stool, or they now have it in freeze, dried little capsules. You know that can also help to restore and replenish the microbiome, but the reason but mushrooms contain beta glucans and they contain something called this is very five. This is very strong non digestible fiber that makes up the cell wall of each cell in that fungal organism and it's very strong. I don't have ever seen pictures of like like cement pavers that are being raised up by a mushroom that's growing Strong this fiber, and that's one reason when we have that mushrooms need to be cooked in order for them, for you, to receive any of their medicinal benefits and many of the nutritional benefits as well.

Speaker 2: 31:41

They need to be cooked so we can break down that cell wall and the beta glucan are part of that cell wall. Turns out that the fiber of beta glucans and the fiber of the kite and kites are precursor to glucose, I mean, by the way, and was found also in that hard exoskeleton we see in crabs and lobsters and shrimp. But the kite and the beta glucan are actually food for the microbiome and the beta glucan that are the dish being food for the microbiome. The beta glucans alter the, alter the, the immune cells that are in the barrel and have them reduce the pathogenic bacteria. So you not you don't just feed the microbiome, you also modulate the microbiome to have more of the good bugs and less of the bad bugs.

Speaker 2: 32:32

And I spoke about one mushroom, lions main for its ability to help with cognition. Well before we learned that it was good for cognition, lions main historically has been used for GI issues, is used for gastritis. There's some evidence it helps with inflammatory bowel disease as well. And we know there's that neurogenic connection, like we mentioned the stress with IBS. So if you know that the lion's main is settling things down in the brain in terms of stress, it's going to have an effect?

Speaker 2: 33:05

It's the brain. Gut access is going to have good effect on the gut as well. Another mushroom that I mentioned earlier for mast cells, the chaga, historically has also known to be good for as a digestive tonic. So I would look at either one of those or both of those together as individual mushrooms. We don't have a combination. Has those two in it to be used as companions with everything else that you would be doing to try to help that poor dog who has terrible bowel spasms and diarrhea, and the household and everything else. You know one little hint, you know essential oil of peppermint, a couple of drops in the water. Peppermint has a smooth muscle, anti spasmodic herb and so they recommend this for humans. Yeah, a glass of water, one drop of peppermint oil, drink it and you can. You know, if the smell of the peppermint doesn't dissuade the dog for taking the food, it could be very helpful in terms of just reducing some of that discomfort when they get those those diarrhea spasms, you know.

Speaker 1: 34:20

Yeah, poor guy. That's an easy suggestion for the pet parents.

Speaker 2: 34:25

Yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 34:27

Yeah, I feel like we've tried so many things with this guy, so yeah, but we will definitely look into the mushroom aspect. Okay, Dr Silver, this has been really lovely. Is there anything else that you want to add for the pet parents anything that we should know.

Speaker 2: 34:43

Well, I think that there's a lot of resources available today for the pet parent to learn more from people who are experts out there. Certainly, coming and listening to your podcast is an excellent resource for them. You know, I've been, I've been looking at many of the Facebook pages out there and the pet summits that they're doing, and you know, and really trying to figure out how I can fit into all of this as well, and so I'm in the process of trying to develop my own Facebook group and some some coaching and some online courses and workshops that that will allow me to share some of my knowledge and some of my skills with pet parents to benefit the health of their pets. So I think this is just, you know, a great opportunity, as I again thank you for offering that to me today and I hope that it's a benefit to your listeners.

Speaker 1: 35:43

Absolutely. Thank you so much, dr Silver, for joining me.

Speaker 2: 35:47

It's been a lot of fun. I really appreciate what you're doing, so thank you so much.

Speaker 1: 35:52

Thank you. Thank you, dr Silver. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Baroo podcast. Dr Rob and Real Mushrooms are offering Baroo listeners 25% off their first order at Real Mushrooms for pets, so I put a link in the show notes for your 25% off, or you can go to thebaroocom to shop podcast and you will also be able to purchase through a link on thebaroocom, as always, if you enjoyed the episode, please don't forget to rate and follow us wherever you listen to podcasts, and you can also follow on Instagram at Baroo podcast. And if you have a story of canine companionship that you'd like to share with me, or a question or even a comment, I would love to hear from you. You can email me, charlotte, at thebaroocom. Alright, you guys, let's chat soon.