Q&A with Rob: How can we be sure a Medium isn't reading a person's mind to give "signs"?

Here's a fascinating question from a woman named Laura who read my "Pets and the Afterlife" book - inquiring if all "spirit messages" are just mediums reading people's minds. It's not, and here's why.

COMMENT/QUESTION: After reading Pets and the Afterlife I am left wondering how Rob Gutro so easily believes that anytime a psychic hits on some accurate information about a deceased pet that it is proof that the animal is communicating from the other side? And not just that the psychic is reading the mind of the owner? I'm waiting for a deceased animal to impart some information that the owner doesn't know but which can later be verified! Then I can be convinced of what I so desperately want to believe! Laura.

ANSWER: That's a great question. Laura's question would also then suggest that mediums are all just mind readers, including those mediums who communicate with people (I have communicated with both. So, there are a lot of things to explain here.

First, there's a difference between a psychic and a medium and a mind reader. 
A psychic connects with energies of past, present and future. They can't read minds.

A medium, of which I am one - and I am NOT a psychic, only can receive messages from people or pets who have passed on.

Mind reading is an entirely different gift.

Second, mind readers read minds of people they are near. They don't do it from afar because they need that personal energy connection. As such, the readings I give people are always done remotely  by email. I don't have any physical closeness to the person, don't know anything about them, their lives, their homes, their lifestyle or their pets.

Third, like people in spirit, pets in spirit convey things that ONLY their pet parents would know. That's how they prove their identity.  Sometimes spirits they share pain of death with me.

In many cases of readings I've done, the pet parent didn't know exactly what their pet was suffering from, or how they passed, but their pet conveyed that- as in a story in my Pets in the Afterlife 2 book, where a dog named Clancy showed me he was eating plants that proved toxic to him.
   When I emailed the mom and told her, she confirmed that Clancy loved to nibble on plants in the backyard, and she found several toxic plants in her yard from the SPCA list of toxic plants that I gave her. That said, if I were a mind reader, how could I provide an answer to a pet's death that only the pet knew, and the pet parent didn't know, but ultimately understood?  I couldn't.