Jackson Galaxy's "Vaccine Detox"

The Cat Daddy's pseudoscience could harm those he claims to love

A few cultural moments helped our household survive the pandemic, with art perfectly timed for capturing and alleviating the intensity of lockdowns. While everyone has their own list, here’s a few from ours:

• Fiona Apple’s Fetch the Bolt Cutters

• Bo Burnham’s “Inside”

• Jackson Galaxy’s cat videos

We started watching “Cat Daddy” segments long before Covid. When we rescued our Persian, Baltasar, we consumed as many behavioral tips as possible. Our Maine Coon, Magellan, was rescued from New York City street life, and never really grew accustomed to living with other cats. He tolerated my (now deceased) cats, Anula and Osiris, but something about Baltasar sent him into a rage.

We hired a cat behaviorist. We bought Jackson Galaxy’s books. And we watched endless hours of his videos, both to help us understand our cats and adjust our behaviors to better fit theirs. Also, we just liked listening to Jackson endlessly talk about cats.

Jackson Galaxy is a quirky dude. Strong shades of hippy emerge from his purple living room. Sure, he’s a salesman. We bought his cat toys, but I like to support people I learn from. And he seems like a guy who genuinely cares about animals.

Another plus is how pro-veterinarian Jackson has been. He advocates for regular visits despite the fact that pet owners are more likely to bring dogs in. Hippie vibe, sure, but I didn’t get an anti-science vibe.

Yes, he sells flower essences for cats. My wife even bought some when we were trying to integrate Baltasar into our family. (They didn’t work.) I mentally pushed this side of his many products to the side. Since homeopathy is effectively useless, as least it wasn’t doing damage.

And then this weekend happened, when I discovered a curious product among his product line.

Holistic grifterinarian

Galaxy co-founded the herbal line of flower essences with “holistic veterinarian” Jean Hofve in 2000, extending a company she founded in 1995 called Spirit Essence Flower Essence Therapy for Animals. As a practitioner of “veterinary homeopathy,” Hofve has some questionable views on medicine. For more context, we cover the homeopathy grift in depth on Conspirituality 77.

Hofve is an acolyte of Dr Edward Bach, a British doctor and homeopath assigned to treat soldiers during World War 1. In 1917, Bach collapsed on the field and was given three months to live. As his telling of his origin story goes, he and made a full recovery thanks to…having a positive attitude!

Bach devoted himself into alternative medicine. By the thirties he “identified” 38 plant and flower remedies, five of which are still used in the popular homeopathic product, Rescue Remedy.

Here’s how Bach’s “scientific process” worked:

• Bach shunned medical research and relied on intuition thanks to a supposed psychic connection with plants

• He would feel a negative emotion, hold his hands over different plants, and whichever one alleviated the emotion would go into the vial

• The vial contained dewdrops “experiencing early morning sunlight,” which “transferred” the healing power of the flower into the water

• The dew was mixed with brandy to produce a “mother tincture,” though later he created an even stronger method of suspending flowers in spring water

Hofve is just one of many alternative medicine practitioners to spin up a line of “essences.” She just happened to find an early lane marketing to pet owners, and has likely benefited greatly by her business relationship with Galaxy.

She also fully immersed herself in Bach’s mysticism. In 2010, she wrote,

Since Dr. Bach’s time, many other essences have been created around the world, not only from flowers, but also from gems, minerals, animals, butterflies, lakes, sacred earth sites, stars, and even angels. Many of them are very useful in helping our animals recover from trauma, injury, and stress. These non-flower essences are often referred to as “energy” or “vibrational” essences.

As with many pseudoscience conspiritualists , Hofve borrows the same sentiments usually applied to humans and applies them to other animals. For example, she writes that cats are no longer in their natural environment and so must contend with the ravages of society, often in ways that we’ll never understand (given that we can’t communicate with them in the same way as other humans). She continues:

In terms of Dr. Bach’s philosophy, it is easy to see how animals are similarly diverted from their “true course.” We forcibly wean them, take them from their families, and train them to exist with their human companions by altering or suppressing natural behaviors — even to the extent of surgery, such as spaying and neutering (or in extreme cases, mutilation such as declawing or de-barking).

Hofve grants some grace to cat owners, claiming domestication is a trade-off. She’s not advocating for declawing, for example, but spaying and neutering is a pretty important intervention. The average life span of a domesticated cat is over triple those in feral colonies. To her credit, Hofve isn’t asking you to open the front door and let your cat run free. (She would have no market for flower essences.)

She’s also not anti-vax per se. But it certainly rhymes.

In another 2010 blog post, she recommends a limited course of vaccines for both cats and dogs. She calls other vaccines “useless” and “dangerous,” providing questionable and limited data to back up her claims. Pseudoscience quickly slips in with her grandiose statements.

Until recently, vaccinations were considered harmless and beneficial. But today, scientific evidence proves that there are many potential harmful effects.

Evidence? Of course not. Just conjecture.

In yet another 2010 post, Hofve seems increasingly uncomfortable with vaccines. She claims that any needle injected into a feline body is potentially cancer-causing (while warning against microchipping your cat). She continues,

Killed vaccines (rabies, feline leukemia, and FIV) are, by far, the most commonly implicated tumor-causing agents because they are designed to create inflammation in the area of injection.

As some early readers of this posted have noted, injection-site sarcoma is a real issue. In the original post, however, “designed” is italicized to drive home the idea that something nefarious is at play. Again, she tries to find balance, noting that microchipping your cat increases your chances of being reunited with them should they stray. But there’s a persistent “but…” hanging in most of her posts.

It gets worse. If you must microchip, Hofve advises doing so “away from meridian lines.” She then recommends a homeopathic product based on wild rosemary, which has shown no efficacy for anything therapeutic in studies.

Hofve is using a technique we see often in the study of conspirituality: cede some ground while continuing to “just ask questions” (and make sure to italicize and bold clams you want to stick in reader’s minds, especially if that helps sell product).

To tox or not to tox…

Vaccine detoxes are not a real thing, in humans or cats.

But you’ll find plenty of blog posts claiming the latter is possible, often linking to a supplement or herbal tincture, while providing no clinical evidence.

I expect this from random blogs. And I expect better from Jackson Galaxy.

Galaxy doesn’t spend a lot of time discussing flower essences on his show. It’s much more likely to see a link to his store in the show notes or an on-screen banner than to have him hard sell products during a segment (though he has been known to do some product placement, to be fair).

This makes his flower essences business even more frustrating. As someone who spends so much time providing credible information about cat behaviors, why go off the rails to make a few bucks and alienate pro-science fans?

Here’s the actual marketing copy for their vaccine detox:

HOLISTIC CARE REVOLVES IN PART AROUND THE BALANCE BETWEEN THE PHYSICAL BODY AND THE ENERGETIC. WE BELIEVE THAT USING EVERYTHING AT OUR DISPOSAL TO HELP BOTH ENDS OF THIS SPECTRUM IS THE KEY TO TOTAL WELLNESS. THIS SOLUTION HELPS THE ANIMAL'S ENERGY SYSTEM DETOXIFY AND RE-BALANCE ITSELF AFTER VACCINATIONS WHICH CAN EMBED FOREIGN SUBSTANCES AND ENERGIES INTO THE BODY.

None of this is true. Vaccinations don’t “embed foreign substances” in the body. The energy claim is even more disdainful as you can’t “prove” something that cannot be measured, which is effectively how holistic grifting works: invent an improvable problem and sell a solution.

It’s sad to see Galaxy endorse such a grift. From the looks of it, this side of the business belongs predominantly to Hofve. When he mentions this line of products, it’s generally in vague terms, like in this 2019 interview.

I co-founded the company with a holistic veterinarian back in 2000, and we now have over 30 different formulas for cats and dogs addressing all kinds of energetic issues, behavior and physical. It’s been really encouraging to see that there has been an embrace of holistic remedies across the board.

I’m not sure what board he’s citing here, but it’s certainly not a scientific or medical board.

However Galaxy came to be involved with a “vaccine detox,” his name and photo are on the product. He’s certainly profiting from a dropper bottle that’s perfectly poised to take advantage of the increasingly anti-vax fervor gripping our society.

That’s unfair to pet owners susceptible to such a grift.

And it’s even more unfair to cats, the very animal that Galaxy purports to love.