Episode with 5 Dr. Allison Marshall: Holistic Veterinary Medicine, and Trusting the Toolbox

Welcome back to the Energy Exchange with host Alane Paulley. This episode is a conversation between two women who have both spent careers believing in something before the mainstream caught up, and who have both paid the price for it.Dr. Allison Marshall is the owner of Full Circle Vet, an equine veterinary practice in the Richmond, Virginia area built entirely around chiropractic, acupuncture, Chinese herbal medicine, and fascial release. She started as a conventional equine vet, spent nine years in traditional practice, then made the leap to holistic medicine in 2005, the same year she was pregnant with her third child, training in chiropractic and acupuncture across 18 weekend intensives while managing a young family. She has been teaching at the Chi University since 2010 and is currently building out the Equine Wellness Network, an advanced training program for veterinarians who want to go deeper into manual therapy.Alane and Dr. Marshall go deep on the crossover between what they each do, how PMF and acupuncture address many of the same systems through different doors, and why the horses that benefit the most are the ones whose owners actually pay attention. They talk about the role of fascia as a communication system in the body, how horses take significantly less electromagnetic field than humans do, and the clinical research currently underway looking at how PMF interacts with fascia in horses, pigs, and dogs.They also take on some harder questions. What happens when regulatory bodies like FEI and HISA write rules about modalities they don't fully understand? Who pays the price when fear of overreach causes practitioners to pull back from animals that need care? And what does it actually mean to be an expert in a field where no one person can know everything?The conversation moves through motherhood and career, the guilt of trying to do both, what it looks like to raise kids who can take care of themselves, how energy and vibration shape who shows up at your barn door, and why the best practitioners are the ones who are still surprised by what they see every week.Dr. Marshall closes with three things every horse owner should start doing tomorrow and the one thing she believes now that she would have laughed at 10 years ago.