My lab (yellow) is scratching Nonstop. His neck and elbows are raw and he definitely has a yeast infection, he smells horrible. His neck always looks wet and brown in color and he scratches all the time. Any help on how to get him healed please share with me. I took him to a vet about 10 weeks ago but as soon as his prescription ran out his scratching came right back. Thanks
I agree, he needs to go back to the vet. It sounds like it could be an allergy to something. There are tests which vets can carry out to detect what dogs are allergic to. Meanwhile, I would take him off any food with grains or gluten in it and ideally get him onto a raw diet - since this is a very common allergen and it is pretty easy to give that a try...
I tried a grain free diet for a little while for him but my vet told me that a grain free diet would possibly lead to heart worms. Anyone ever hear of this? The vet basically told me to return his died to purina one smart blend.
No, that is ridiculous. Heartworms are a parasite transmitted through mosquito bites. There is no research showing any correlation to diet of any kind: https://www.heartwormsociety.org/pet-owner-resources/heartworm-basics Vets receive no training (or only a few hours of training) on nutrition during their veterinary training. Furthermore, they frequently receive money from pet food companies for pushing particular brands and pet food companies market heavily towards vets. You might want to check out these resources, for starters: https://healthypets.mercola.com/sit.../01/26/biologically-appropriate-pet-food.aspx https://healthypets.mercola.com/sit.../kibble-fed-dogs-metabolic-stress-levels.aspx https://bmcvetres.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12917-017-0981-z
Now that is ridiculous. True, vets are not "nutritional experts" unless they've had advanced residency training in nutrition and passed the board certification exam of the American College of Veterinary Nutrition but saying vets receive none or little training only adds to the deep well of myths and misinformation found on the Internet.
Certainly get a new vet! I've dealt with bad vets before and it can cost you lots of money for the wrong medication. My previous vet gave my older dog some medication for something she had ( can't remember exactly what it was it was three years ago) and it gave her stomach ulcers which then needed more medication for and then when she got very sick with heart failure they refused to believe she had heart failure even though we'd had the same issues with all of our Japanese spitz and she was the same always collapsing and struggling to breathe and eventually we had her put to sleep because they wouldn't even do a scan on her heart and she couldn't walk a few steps without collapsing. The day we put her to sleep they checked her gums and was like "oh her gums are blue, must be lack of oxygen due to her heart" we were so angry the poor dog suffers for weeks with this and the vet wouldn't help. We've got a different vet now and he's great best vet we've ever had and actually seems to care for the dog.
Sorry @AlphaDog but it's very true. Please read 'Feed Your Pet Right' by Marion Nestle, Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies and Public Health and Professor of Sociology at NYU. Thoroughly referenced and exquisitely researched without bias, as you might expect from a top academic. I quote: (p 282) "Curious about what veterinary students are currently learning about nutrition, we conducted a telephone survey of all twenty-seven veterinary schools accredited in the United States... five said they taught no nutrition at all. But most of the twenty-two remaining said their instruction was elective or minimal. About ten veterinary schools require students to take a nutrition course, usually one credit... Only one school - Tufts - offered nutrition instruction throughout training... A programme this comprehensive is the rare exception...."
I think the confusion here might be that there are concerns over a link between commercially produced grain free diets and a heart condition called cardiomyopathy. Nothing to do with worms, but certainly a heart issue. Maybe it was a slip of the tongue and the vet meant heart probs? Anyway, last I heard was that the U.S. Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Veterinary Medicine and the Veterinary Laboratory Investigation and Response Network were investigating this link. I'm not sure if there are any results in yet. So, if you want to give your dog a grain free diet at this time, it would perhaps be a sensible precaution to feed a natural raw meat and bone diet, rather than buying grain free kibble.
When we still had Tilly, our vet said that most food allergies in dogs were related to the protein, not the grains. Tilly seemed to do better on Chicken based food rather than Salmon based, though we never completely eliminated her ear infections, we did keep them pretty well controlled.
