A doctor learns a thing or two from horses and dogs. How did Dr. Kiburz become interested in Hyaluronic Acid as a beneficial molecule in the first place?
For that answer, we must turn to dogs, cats, and horses. Dr. Kiburz and his wife, Connie, own dogs, cats, and horses. Horses are a Kiburz family obsession: The Kiburz’ have raised, ridden, and
shown award-winning American Quarter Horses for 35 years. Dr. Kiburz’ daughters, Alice and Beth, have won state, regional and world championships at horse shows. The Kiburz also work with a local trainer to train their dogs.
Dr. Kiburz loves his animals. Several years ago, to improve his animals’ health and mobility, Dr. Kiburz began to administer a veterinary HA product to his animals. HA is safe and effective for all mammals. He observed, with a physician’s eye for health-related research, that HA benefitted his animals by improving their health and ability to move and rebound after activity.
A valuable characteristic of studying the effects of oral supplements in animals is that animals do not distinguish an oral supplement from everything else they eat so they have no prior
expectations for how they will be affected by the oral supplement. The prior expectation that a human patient has for how an oral supplement will affect them is called “placebo effect”. Placebo effect is an important problem to be overcome in clinical studies in humans. However, because animals do not experience placebo effect, researchers can see the true effect of an oral supplement
without placebo effect. This is why research studies of supplements and drug effects in animals are important: These studies allow researchers to achieve unbiased results, which may not be achievable in human studies.
Dr. Kiburz observed that his animals—dogs, cats, and horses—benefit from taking HA and are free of placebo effect. The animals really did benefit from the HA supplement. Independently
of Dr. Kiburz’s observations and without knowing that the animals had been taking HA, the trainers who work with his dogs and the farriers (people who change the shoes on horses), who work with his horses have echoed Dr. Kiburz’s observations of his dogs’ and horses’ improved mobility and flexibility. The benefits of HA that Dr. Kiburz observed in animals got him to thinking: Would HA be beneficial for the health and mobility of his patients, too? His review of the peer-reviewed scientific and clinical literature suggested that his patients would benefit greatly from a high quality, high molecular weight HA product. Unfortunately, he was unable to find an available HA product that met his quality specifications.
What is a physician to do? If you are Douglas Kiburz, you develop your own high-quality HA product, HA-TOPSHELF, that you are confident will be safe and effective for your patients, your family, and your animals. Dr. Kiburz and his wife, Connie, take HA-TOPSHELF themselves. They give it to their other “family” members—feline, canine and equine. The dog trainer who trains the Kiburz’s dogs, was so impressed with the improvement in Dr. Kiburz’s dogs and the quality of HA-TOPSHELF, that he started giving HA-TOPSHELF to his own dogs. That is a pretty good product endorsement!