Feline Stomatitis: “A Mouth On Fire”

Reprinted with permission from Dr. Will Falconer

Yowza! This really pains me!

Marie asked if I’d speak to this disease. A fair name for it: “mouth on fire.”

You were once my homeopathic vet when I lived in Austin back in the late 1990’s. I have a cat with stomatitis and it’s heartbreaking to see him in pain when he eats. I give him pate type food with enough water to make a slurry. Our vet is traditional and his only solution is steroid shots. 

What’s Stomatitis?

Stoma: mouth, orifice, and you know the -itis word, so common in any number of places today: inflammation.

This can progress to a fire engine red, painful, foul smelling mouth that can cause cats to cry out on eating or back away from food after the first painful bite. It’s really pretty heart breaking, as Marie’s experience attests.

If you raise your cat’s upper lip and pull it back without opening the mouth, you can see redness in excess of the normal background uniform pink in the gums.

If you have a largely black cat, the gums may follow suit, so you have to look for other signs, like:

• Pain on eating, dropping food around the bowl

• Horrible bad breath

• Swollen gums

• Drooling, often thick and foul

If you see a fine red line at the gum margin, your cat is in the early, more easily treated group. This symptom is so common in practice, vet homeopaths gave it an abbreviation: rgl (red gum line) for ease of note taking.

Luckily, many stop at this stage and don’t go on to the whole mouth inflammation this disease is known for.

Why Do Cats Get This?

Causation is a tiny bit murky, with “bad genes” sometimes getting the blame in conventional medicine.

Meh. I see that as code for “Let’s bail, we’re can’t take the blame.”

The bottom line: cats living in natural settings (think: bobcat, lion, lynx) don’t get this disease.

It’s yet another man-made chronic disease.

There’s clearly “immune dysregulation” at play.

And where is that coming from?

Well, think with me for a moment. What sets out to stimulate the immune system but often goes awry, instead creating allergies or worse, autoimmune disease, where that well honed protective system turns on its own host?

Why, it’s vaccinations, of course.

And, unless they reside in a zoo, obviously no one is vaccinating the big cats and wild cousins. So, it shouldn’t be any great leap to assume this is yet another man-made disease.

And autoimmunity is indeed the operant diagnosis here: Fluff’s immune system has turned against her own teeth!

The plaque and the proteins and ligaments supporting her teeth are now viewed as foreign by the mistuned immune system! Attack! Attack!

Steroids? Toothlessness? Do Better!

The use of steroids (or its newer cousins like cyclosporine, etc.) are employed to hammer Fluff’s out of control immune system into a quieter state.

And, while brilliant in the short term, long term use quickly creates greater problems.

Full mouth tooth extractions (!) are often another answer, and seem to “work” for a fair number of cats. (Remember the surgeon’s motto? “A chance to cut is a chance to cure!”)

Their logic: “We’ll just remove those structures that are the focus of the attack! Fluff can get along without her teeth.”

Difficult, but Treatable with Homeopathy

I had some prolonged cases of at least palliation (as long as we kept giving remedies, we got relief and the ability to eat without pain). Maybe a couple went on to cure, it’s too long ago to recall.

Likely, as we constitutionally treated a cat, those with merely rgl (red gum lines) cleared up, or at least never advanced to full on stomatitis.

This is, once again, the work of treating the “whole cat,” which takes a serious homeopathic vet whose practice is mostly or only focused on homeopathy and perhaps nutrition.