Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:00:16]:

Hello, I'm Dr. Edward. I'm known as the healing vet. Edward Bassingthwaite is my name. And as you can see, I'm surrounded by animals. And I'd like to welcome you to this, which is kind of like our introductory episode of a new podcast, which I'm about to launch very soon. I've got Fred here helping me out. Fred the cat.

Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:00:38]:

I've got Pearl, my ancient whippet. We've got Mitsy here, too, who's cute and fluffy and all sorts of fun. So let me tell you a little bit about the Pets, People and Harmony podcast. This podcast is intended to bring out into the world deep lived wisdom from our guests that is going to transform the lives of your pets for the better. There's going to be episodes that are more focused on humans and transforming your life for the better, because guess what? Whenever you transform your life for the better, you absolutely transform your pets lives for the better in a lot of profound and beautiful ways. And harmony. So pets, people and harmony. So I'm also a singer songwriter, musician.

Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:01:32]:

Music is a massive part of my life. And there's every chance that we'll have episodes where I bring in guest musicians and we have people singing songs and stuff like that. But harmony is not just about music for me. Harmony is about things being in balance, things singing together so that you can have your own life, your own body, your own health and well being in a state of harmony, you can have your relations, your relationships, your interactions with other people, too, in balance and in harmony. So being in harmony for me, means being in tune with my life, being in tune with all the activities and things that are going on with my life and being in tune with these beautiful animals like Mitsy, who share my life, and Pearl and Fred, who are over there a little bit too. Harmony for me is a really deep, beautiful principle in my life. But I want to tell you a little bit about me, basically. You want to hop down, little buddy? Help you go, then.

Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:02:40]:

Hello to everyone. I'm going to go and get on the bed, write a bit more space. So my name is Edward. I practice as a holistic veterinarian. The Healing Vet is the brand and name and business under which I work as a veterinarian. As I said, I'm a musician, so I'm out in the world musically as Tree brother. We've just very recently been in the studio recording the Meat and Bones of an album which will be released later in this year, 2023. Just making sure my cat doesn't lie all over my keyboard and make things break and stop working.

Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:03:20]:

Here comes Fred. Fred's going to come over for a little head scratch. And I love gardening, I love growing food, I love making art. So I do visual art mostly these days, with plaster and pigments on board. I'm passionate about personal growth and personal development. Spiritual practices are a big part of my life. So meditation and chigong and a whole range of other things. So I'm what you might call multi passionate, multi passionate kind of person in that I have a lot of different things that I have deep interest and joy and love in doing.

Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:04:02]:

One other thing that is a big part of my life is the modality that I've created which is called the whole Energy Body Balance method which is a neurofascial body work and energy healing, intuitive development. Somatic awareness modality for helping pets, people and horses in terms of finding and relieving hidden or silent soft tissue pain restrictions throughout the body. It's also very very helpful for healing anxiety and trauma and things like that. But I just want to share a little bit of my life story and how I've got to this point of launching this podcast, which I am tremendously excited about because I've come across a lot of beautiful people in my travels and I'm really looking forward particularly to having some of my special mentors and teachers come on and share their wisdom as we move on through the episodes. And I'll also be dropping in once a week for a little mini episode where I talk about just life, living life, meeting life, living the best life possible. Sometimes in the face of challenges, sometimes in the face of things going really well, some really challenging times can cause problems and sometimes things going really well can cause problems of a higher quality nature. So I grew up on a cattle property in North Queensland here in Australia. So if you're listening from the United States or Canada then we'd be saying that that's a ranch.

Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:05:38]:

It was an extensive beef cattle operation. We'd have anything from 5000 head of cattle on the place depending on the seasons, how dry it was or whatever. Very beautiful landscape. The great basalt wall, which is one of the more recent lava flows in Australia ran through our place. There's a lot of springs, springs welling up, beautiful waterfalls and just an incredibly amazing earth spot to have the privilege of growing up on. Now, when I was young we also had horses. We did all of our stockwork on the property on horseback because a lot of the country was too rough and too rocky for any kind of wheel device to be able to move over at all, let alone safely. So we did a lot of work with horses.

Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:06:35]:

Horses were a huge part of our life. We had a large herd of beautiful Australian stockhorses which we bred, competed, trained on. We competed most passionately in a horse and cattle based sport here in Australia called camp drafting which if you're in the USA, some of the elements of cutting are a little bit like camp drafting but it's its own unique kind of sport. If you want to look up camp drafting. Go on YouTube and search for camp drafting so that you can see how that works. But I was very passionate about training, competing and working with horses right through my younger years, through my teens and late teens and early 20s. Then I went off to veterinary school. I went and learned how to become a veterinarian at the University of Queensland in Brisbane in Australia.

Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:07:33]:

That took about six years of study. I graduated in 1995 with a Bachelor of Veterinary Science, second class honors, and after that I went into practice as a veterinarian. At that time, I was well and healthy and full of energy. And coming from a rural background, working on a farm, a large animal background, I thought, well, you know what? I'm going to go off and work in mixed practice. And specifically, I'm going to go and work with horses, because horses were a great love of mine. So I went and took a job just about as far away across Australia as possibly could be from where I live. So I lived in North Queensland and I got a job in the bottom down the south of Western Australia, right across the other side of this tremendously vast continent that Australia is now. That job was kind of crap.

Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:08:33]:

It was a toxic workplace. I definitely was not cared for in my beginnings as a veterinary surgeon. I was thrown in the deep end and incredible stress of a lot of hours of work, pretty poorly paid, and often complained at a lot for not being able to do things that no one had ever helped me learn how to do, because I was very inexperienced veterinarian. So after 18 months of that job, I left because I just couldn't take it anymore. It was breaking me. And at that time I was thinking, man, do I really want to be a veterinarian? I found out when I quit. My boss then told me that when I first went out to see my own, first horse on my own in that job, a month or two into working for these people, this horse had a hugely swollen hind leg and swelling under its belly. And the only thing I could think of that was likely to be was some kind of allergy.

Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:09:41]:

So I treated it as an allergic reaction, like a sting and a swelling and that sort of thing. Unbeknownst to me, my boss went back to see that horse because things didn't get better and diagnosed a ruptured cruciate ligament going on with the horse. As you can see, whenever we have pets, people and Harmony podcasts, there's often going to be a whole lot of animals getting in the middle of everything, demanding that they get head scratches and purring like demons, which Fred is right now. So he went back and diagnosed a ruptured crete ligament in this horse, which is, I got to tell you, so vanishingly rare as an injury or a problem with horses that it wasn't even mentioned at any point in the teaching that I got in the veterinary school. But my boss at that point decided, well, obviously I'm a shitbet and he wouldn't then let me work with any other horses. So I did get some stitch ups and stuff like that, but they were actively unbeknownst to me without talking to me at any point for the next 16 months or whatever, were actively not letting me go anywhere near horses, pretty much. So that was a shock to my system and I was pretty hurt and upset and went off to do some locum work, some temporary work, bruised and battered emotionally and spiritually by the treatment that I'd received at this first job. And at this first job, which was at a clinic in Geraldton, north of Perth.

Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:11:20]:

I'd been south of Perth near Bunbury to start with, and I'd love Western Australia. I also love surfing and, well, that's where I started surfing and spent a lot of time in the ocean, floating around, just absolutely enjoying that beautiful sensation of being at one with nature while while surfing. So when I was in Geraldton, I was working in a mixed practice there as well. And I did get to work with some horses, but unfortunately, because of lack of experience, I wasn't very skillful at working with horses. And I also did sometime before that, go to look at working at a dedicated specialist horse practice. But I decided that I didn't want to work 50% more for 25% less wages and made a choice based on lifestyle not to do that. But when I was working at the vet clinic in Geraldton, another vet came to visit, Dr. Tomahearn, who'd worked out this innovative way of working with horses necks.

Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:12:21]:

He would take the horses, anesthetize them, and when they're down on their side, stretch up their neck and mobilize the vertebrae. He'd take these horses that had a falling lameness that might have been nerve blocked and x rayed and assessed two or three times and they couldn't find any reason for it. But he would work with the neck and release the vertebrae in the neck and the lameness would go away. So I was just fascinated by this because I'd never heard anything about anything like this at university. So Dr. Tom was really generous with his time, with his attention, with his wisdom. And we sat down and he basically gave me a whole download of all that he knew about nerve recompression, how it causes changes in sensation and blood supply and how it can compromise the health and well being of the parts of the body where that nerve goes out to. If you get a little misalignment of the vertebrae, then that nerve where it comes out can get kind of squished, causes all sorts of problems.

Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:13:26]:

Now, I thought, well, what about dogs and cats? Because they have necks and backs too, right? They have a spine. This Fred here. Fred is hanging onto the covering here. I know, he's super cute, isn't he? Has got a neck and a back. So I started feeling into exploring more deeply with palpation and touch through the necks and spines of all the cats and dogs that I was seeing as a veterinarian. And very quickly, once I started actively seeking to find what was going on in this part of the body, I started finding a whole lot of pain, of tension, of restriction, of dysfunction in the tissues and structures throughout the spine and associated with the spine. That before I went looking for them, I couldn't see them, right? They weren't there because I didn't know that I needed to look for them. So when I found pain, tension restriction in these animals bodies, I wanted to help the animals because that's my whole purpose, really, is to help animals.

Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:14:28]:

It's a very large part of my life and sole purpose on this planet is working with animals as a veterinarian, as a physical therapist, as an intuitive and a healer. So I also do all that sort of stuff. I'm going to talk a little bit about how I came to the more energy healing side of things a little bit further down this road that I'm taking you on of my life story. So there were no modalities in those days. There was nowhere that I could go to learn how to do physical therapies with dogs and cats. So what I did was I just started playing around, gently watching the animals carefully with price, with touch and pressure and movement to see if I could release these problems. And very quickly we're getting animals coming back way more comfortable, way more mobile, and people who own the animals telling me, wow, I'm seeing really good changes in my animals. They're more active, they've got better mobility, they're more playful, they're wanting more interaction with their humans, for instance.

Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:15:30]:

And sometime after this, I went to the UK to live and work as a locum vet for about 18 months. And I remember at one of the hospitals I worked at, this little Jack Russell limped in he came, limp, limp, limp for his about four year old yearly checkup. I said, what's going on with your little dog? Said, oh, he's got a limp. He has, doctor, he's had Olympia's whole life long, he has. We've taken X rays and everything and we couldn't find any reason for it. So we just figured we've got a limpy dog. And even this little dog is over his shoulder blade on that side of the limp. All the muscle on one side was completely atrophied and gone.

Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:16:07]:

It was just kind of like a hollow where the muscle should be. Now, when I started feeling into this little guy's neck, right down in the bottom of his neck, I found an incredibly painful, restricted, tight area. And I did some physical therapy to release and open up and relieve this tight, restricted, painful area that I had found. And what I found was that we helped it. It went away, and the limp went away, and suddenly he was all better right now. Unfortunately, very shortly after that, towards the end of my time in England, I became incredibly unwell with chronic fatigue syndrome. I was down to 45 kilos. Had a whole spectrum of awful symptoms, fatigue, pain, insomnia, and a whole lot of stuff.

Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:17:00]:

I had to come back to Australia. I could not work, could not do anything. Had Western medicine helped me a little bit in the beginning, western medicine very rapidly ran out of answers. That's when I started exploring, working with intuitives and energy healing. And I started to study energy healing. I went off and learned a thing called the EMF balancing technique. And that's when I found out that animals can feel healing energies and they like them, because every time I practice, my little stuffy would come run up the steps and sit my feet. Now, there'd be heaps of other times when I was sitting in the same place using a pen on paper in a similar way, and she wouldn't care.

Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:17:34]:

But every single time I connected with and practiced with moving the healing energies, my little staffie would come doodle up the steps, come and sit with me. Now, I had about 20 years of chronic fatigue because I didn't know that I also had Lyme disease, which was part of the problem. About seven years ago, I started taking Lyme. Hertz got a good improvement. About five years ago, I got out of being in abuse of narcissistic marriages and relationships, and my health has improved out of sight. I'm back to being healthy, vital, recording albums, working 40 to 60 hours a week, and having a really full, rich life. And I've discovered a lot of really cool stuff through this journey, which is part of the inspiration and motivation for me to start this podcast. Because there's so many people out there that have got deep lived wisdom that if you listen to them and come along to this podcast, you're going to learn so many beautiful things that you can apply to change your life for the better, to transform the lives of your beautiful animals and pets for the better.

Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:18:36]:

Like Fred here. He's coming in to say hello to you all. He's still purring away. He doesn't mind this too much, having head scratches and things like that. So this is my introduction and invitation to you to come along, come back, watch the episodes very soon. It's the beginning of May 2023 right now. We've started doing interviews, and we're going to be dropping them out in the world as episodes pretty soon. But welcome.

Dr Edward (The Healing Vet) [00:19:06]:

If you got anything that you want to ask me, please do. Email me, contact me, say hi. If if you want to be in the loop, then come and join our community at Whole Energybodybalance.com or The Healingvet.com. Look us up on Facebook. It's the healing vet. But this podcast is going to be a stack of fun and you're going to learn a whole lot of beautiful things that are going to transform your life for the better in ways you can't imagine if you come and keep joining us. So I look forward to seeing you all in the potty. Bye for now.