Dr. Stu - dog allergy

So it's about time I abuse your free vet skills

1. Can dogs have human fish oil? ie the pills for humans

2. One of my dogs has terrible allergies - hes been on a customized injection program for the last year with no real good results. We give him steroids (Decadron) every few days other wise he'll scratch himself to death - is that safe to give him decadron so often? Any ideas for alternative allergy alleviation? He's allergic to like everything - including cotton

PS...as of now you are also our doctor of the survival group....speaking of..ill create a new forum for apocolypse survival since the facebook post didnt catch

Devon yes you can give your dog human fish oils, and I I fact recommend it big time. For a dog over 50 pounds I'd start giving 2,000 mg per day. It can really help with the inflammation but may not clear it all up. It's ok to use steroids the way you are as long a it's truly every three days kinda thing when you consider life long care. The allergy I jevtions for the most part never gives a complete cure, but are used to help add in desensitization for the immune system and hopefully decrease the amount of steroids and antihistamines you use. I'm not sure exactly what Decadeon is...I assume it's a generic name for Prednisone or something. What kind of dog do you have, how old, weight and how frequent are the signs? Seasonal? Year round? Have you done a food trial (elimination diet) of any type yet? Have you ever been talked to about something called Cyclosporine? This drug can be a life saver for some allergic dogs...literally as one client just wanted to call in some Jesus to take their dog away due to the ridiculous allergy scene going on. Cyclosporine can be expensive, but is also much better as far as long term side effects and effects on the liver etc compared to steroids. You can use some other drugs to increase the half life of it, thereby making it last longer and saving you money. Might be worth a try. It works.

Decadron is not Prednisone. We've used that too...let me check the bottle...it says just "Decadron" 1.5mg: http://www.drugs.com/pro/decadron.html

He is a 3 year old pitbull, 60 pounds. We got him from the shelter when he was roughly 3 months old. Ever since we had him, his hair/fur has always been thin. At around 5-6 months he had an ear infection, and started to show some signs of slight allergies - between his toes were red, around his eyes were red - vet noticed it and said he might have some allergy. For the next year it kept getting worse until we moved to where we live now - which it is now at its worst. He'll scratch himself until he bleeds and loses skin - under his armpits, chew his feet, scratch his face, etc...

We've done skin scrapings and all that stuff. We did a blood test for allergies and got a list back of like 10000000000000 things that he is allergic to. We've changed his diet 1000000000 times based on what is in them and then if his stomach could handle them. Things still never got better no matter what we did.

So we eventually went to a "dermatologist" and they did a very intensive/expensive skin scrape allergy test - the dermatologist told us the other test we did with our vet. is not that good, and he told us to disregard teh "food" allergies - we did and really haven't noticed a difference with him - better or worse - he's just always bad.

So basically we did 2 diff. allergy tests, got back 2 lists of a bunch of things he's allergic to - we started him on the injections about 1 year ago, and dermatologist said it works with 80% of dogs, and if it doesn't within a year, it prob. won't help - so of course we are taht 20%.

His allergies seem to be year round.

I've never come across Cyclosporine. Do you know roughly what the cost of Cyclosporine is? He also just had two different $3k knee surgeries, so we like to spend our life fortunes on these monsters. What other drugs can be used to increase the half-life?

Thank you in advance, and your check is in the mail.

And he also has an anal and penial discharge that we think is an infection...it looks green and slimey, but it tastes more like horse semen...any idea?

Are you sure it's not actually horse semen? It's the best when you can take that discharge and collect it for awhile, then let it dry out for a bit so its easily mashable into a powdered form. Then you can eat it like fun dip, or better yet, snort it.

Oh wait I totally missed your last question! If you take cyclosporine and use ketaconazole with it, you can save big bucks with it and it works well. Look into it. Cyclosporine is also known as Atopica. Where's my check?

you mean semen isn't green?

check is in the mail...however with the impending doom of humanity and halt of all technology and postal systems, it may take a long time to arrive...keep an eye out

thanks

Dr. Stu - we'll be taking our drug ridden dog to the vet tomorrow, but his skin has been turning a dark brown/blackish color...the best way to describe it is that it looks like hes dirty - like dirt on the skin, but it doesnt come off. and it will sometimes disappear and reappear in random spots...right now his whole hind leg has it, a little on his wanker, and on parts of his ear cartiledge...any ideas? were going to dermatologist tomorrow and are going to ask about cyclosporine too