Does your dog scratch, lick obsessively or chew? There are a lot of reasons your dog or puppy may be itchy. It can be tough trying to narrow it down. If you run to the vet right away, it can also be pretty expensive, and you still may not get the answer. Why? Because vets do not learn nutrition in vet school, a fact they will readily admit. So if your pooch’s itchies come from a food allergy (an easy fix), you won’t get this treatment advice from a vet.
But there are several possible ailments that bring on itching and scratching of the skin. For this article, I assume you have already checked for fleas. This is what I recommend to figure it out by process of elimination. I suggest you start with the “path of least resistance” and work your way down this list.
1. Switch your dog to a grain-free or raw diet. By far the most common source of persistent itching of the skin is an allergy to grains. Your dog should be on a grain-free diet anyway, because it is a carnivore, not an herbivore, and the grains are associated with a large number of ailments in dogs, including cancers, diabetes, GI tract issues and seizures (but that is another post).
Start right out with a recipe that does NOT include chicken at all. The reason is that some dogs have a chicken allergy as well. Perhaps it is not even that they have a chicken allergy, but rather, a soy allergy. Soy is one of the few feeds whose properties will transfer directly to the animal or person that eats the meat that it was fed to. It’s a horrible feed, but most poultry is fed with it. So start right out with either a red meat or fish-based recipe.
2. Add coconut oil to the food every day. Start with about a teaspoon for a Lab-sized dog or larger. After a few days, increase the amount until you have reached about a tablespoon dollop. You can find organic coconut oil at Kroger, WalMart, Costoco and Sam’s Club.
Both the elimination of grains and the addition of the coconut oil should kill an overload of candida yeast in your dog’s system, which could cause systemic itching.
3. Avoid any kind of chemical based shampoos. A natural oatmeal-based shampoo will help soothe your dog while the healing is taking place.
4. If the above has not helped or if there is any loss of fur, do all of the above, BUT bring your dog to the vet for a skin scraping to check for mites and mange. There are several very effective natural remedies for this. We recommend EcoManage by Vet Organics. It will treat both sarcoptic mange and the dreaded demodectic mange, which is “technically” incurable.
5. If none of these things has helped, it is possible that your dog has an allergy to something environmental. The way to to check for this cheaply (but only generally) is to give your dog Benedryl at a maximum dose of 1 milligram per pound of body weight. If it brings relief, then it is probably an environmental allergy.
It is only at this point that I would see the vet and have them do blood work to screen for allergies. If you take the dog to the vet before this point, you could be unnecessarily subjecting your dog to chemicals and pharmaceuticals to treat symptoms that are permanently corrected by a change in diet, supplementation, elimination of yeast or natural elimination of mites and the mange they cause.
6. If your dog also has a mysterious limp that seems to disappear and reappear, along with chronic itchiness, he may be infected with one of the tick-borne diseases such as Lyme or erlychiosis. There is one test that checks for all of them, and it’s inexpensive.
If none of these things fixes your pooch’s itchies… well… I don’t have a clue!
Love your blog so far. Keep it going. Carrie
Love your blog. Please have a article about dogs that lick obsessively, Ryder, our 4 year old lab, has this problem. He licks everything, humans are his favorite to lick. Tammy