My horse is on a calming supplement containing valerian, vervain, and chamomile. I may have to sedate her with Dormosedan in the near future and wondered if anyone knows whether I should discontinue the calmer before she is sedated? Thanks.
No, your horse will be fine. My latest horse (has now moved on) was on basically every calming supplement ever as a “can’t hurt” protocol and had to be sedated with Ace and Dorm every six weeks for shoeing. You don’t really need to worry about most herbal supplements interacting with veterinary-grade sedations like this. If you’re worried call the person administering the dorm. If it’s you, call whoever sold it to you.
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Strikes me as the sort of question I would pose to my vet, not random folks on COTH. 
The prescribing vet should be able to answer it.
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I disagree. Many vets, and human doctors, are not as well-educated in pharmaceuticals as one might think. Knowing interactions between chemicals is not the same as knowing how the anatomy of a horse works.
Valerian, vervain, and chamomile can increase the effects of sedating drugs. I don’t see any other expected negative effects. Thus, I’d probably start with less dorm than I would on a horse not getting those three herbs.
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Thank you. I didn’t check with my vet for exactly this reason.
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It’s unfortunate to lack confidence in your vet’s knowledge. I guess direct them here to become more educated. 
I have no doubt my vet would be able to address this concern if I brought it up to him, and would have the additional insight of knowing the horse and the situation.
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Personally, I think it’s quite alright to acknowledge that a vet (or a professional of any industry) isn’t some all-knowing infallible entity. Sometimes they get things wrong. Sometimes they just don’t know things. And that’s okay.
I asked my vet once about a possible interaction. They said they’d have to research it and get back to me. That is significantly more desirable than a vet who might make something up, so they appear smart. In my case, I told them not to worry about it, I’d research it. They’re a very busy vet, and I’m a chemist that works in chemical safety and can certainly look up information on pharmaceuticals on my own.
My twin sister’s best friend is a pharmacist. She has many stories of doctors prescribing medicines that would kill or cause serious harm to the patient in combination with the patient’s other medications. (And yes, the doctor knew about, or had access to the knowledge of, the other medications.)
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I do know that calming supplements like that have a warning on the label not to give with CNS depressants. Someone was pushing that stuff on me for my horse on stall rest (who is wild only like 0.3% of the time and a picky eater in the first place), and I was like no…my horse gets Robaxin daily…that’s a hard no. Dorm can increase CNS depressant effects of some other substances, so you may want to be more careful with dosing, and you can always err on the side of caution and back off the supplement first.
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Vets can’t possibly know all things about all things, including how every drug interacts with every herbal/natural supplement. I would expect a pharmacist to know more about that, but even then it can be a bit iffy.
I WOULD hope that if the question was brought to my vet, she would say “I don’t know, but I will see what I can find out”.
There are a lot of areas that vets have no in-depth education in unless they have taken it on themselves to do their own education after school. Dentistry, hoof care, nutrition (practical feeding, not the biology of nutrients), supplements/herbals/natural alternatives, those are things that (may) get touched on in school. They are also not things I look firstly to a vet for, unless I know it’s a specialty of theirs.
They are GPs, a few have 1-2 specialties.
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Agreed. I would expect that of any vet that is being asked about the interaction of a drug they are prescribing with anything, whether an herbal potion, a pre-existing condition, another rx med, whatever.
