Review: 'The Dog Doc' takes a thoughtful look at a different kind of veterinarian

The documentary “The Dog Doc” is both a profile of a maverick in the world of veterinary medicine and a thoughtful examination of the pros and cons — mostly pros — of his brand of holistic treatment for his four-footed clientele.

The veterinarian in question is Dr. Martin Goldstein — Dr. Marty to his friends, colleagues and the humans who bring their ailing animals to the Smith Ridge Veterinary Center in South Salem, N.Y., about 50 miles northeast of New York City. For 47 years, Dr. Marty has practiced and espoused an approach to animal care that goes beyond the traditional veterinary medicine he learned at Cornell, including nutritional supplements, acupuncture, magnetic-wave therapy, intravenous vitamin C and cryosurgery.

Goldstein has been called a quack, a charlatan, and worse. (The criticisms are seen in quick clips in the documentary’s early stages.) But he swears by his brand of medicine, and can produce files of many cases where other vets had given a dog or a cat only months to live — only to help the animal live a better, and often longer, life.

This isn’t about miracle cures, Goldstein is quick to say — it’s about helping the animal’s immune system kick in so the animal’s body does the healing. Goldstein rails against pet foods with too many additives and not enough nutrition, and he believes many pet vaccines are overprescribed and improperly given to unhealthy pets. “I’m not anti-vaccine. I’m pro-sanity,” he adds.

Director Cindy Meehl, who immortalized the work of “horse whisperer” Buck Brannaman in the 2011 documentary “Buck,” takes her crew into Smith Ridge’s offices and examination rooms, as Goldstein and his staff try to understand what makes their patients tick. Often, the owners say they have gone to other vets who offered medicines and not much hope. For them, Goldstein’s holistic medicine is a last chance to keep their pets alive.

The stories Meehl chronicles — like the dog, Scooby, whose mouth tumors Goldstein freezes with liquid nitrogen — bear witness to the success Goldstein has had over the years. So does the vet Goldstein meets at a convention, who years earlier confronted Goldstein and was determined to call him out as a fraud, but became a convert and changed his own practice.

Maybe, after listening to the public health experts trying to subdue the coronavirus pandemic, I’ve grown skeptical of anecdotal evidence. Watching “The Dog Doc,” I wished Meehl had featured more of Goldstein’s detractors, and not just shown Goldstein’s dismissal of the criticism against him. I want to believe in Goldstein’s kind of veterinary science, because it looks at pets as creatures rather than chemistry sets wrapped in fur. But, right now, I need more science to convince me.

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‘The Dog Doc’

★★★

Opened March 13 in select cities; available starting Friday, May 8, as a video-on-demand rental on some streaming platforms, including SLFS@Home. Not rated, but probably PG-13 for some graphic veterinary surgery scenes. Running time; 101 minutes.