I remember a few posts popping up on the LR regarding epilepsy in dogs. I’m posting this now in the hope that it may help anybody who has a dog suffering from epilepsy. Please free to re-post this on any forums that may deal with this subject. I’m not claiming that this is the cause of all epilepsy in dogs but it may give dog owners a possible route to explore since it worked for us.
It’s been three years since our dog had his last grand mal seizure. Our dog Murdoch is a golden retriever/black lab cross who at three years old suddenly starting having grand mal epileptic attacks – absolutely horrible to watch, he’d flail uncontrollable and pee himself. In an initial period of five weeks he had eight seizures.
We deal with two women partner veterinarians who I’ll call vet A and vet B. They’re as different as a liberal democrat vs a conservative republican in their openness to alternative care. The problem in their clinic is that whenever we take our dog or cats there we never know which one we’ll get.
Initially we took Murdoch to vet A and she told me to put him on phenobarbital. She explained that it would never be a cure but might diminish the frequency of the attacks. A brief internet search revealed that phenobarbital is pure poison. It causes depression and destroys a dog’s liver not to mention many other possible side effects. We made it very clear to vet A that there was no way in hell that we would put our dog on this crap.
I then began exploring several net forums dealing with alternative health therapies for dogs. The recurring theme that kept popping up was that of food allergies being caused the crap dog foods people are feeding them. Further investigation on the web came to a site that analyzed the garbage that dogs are being fed in commercial foods, and not just the made in China Walmart stuff, but also some of the supposedly higher end foods.
I talked to vet A and her response was “there is nothing about this in any of the scientific journals”. End of conversation. Her attitude was that if somebody hasn’t published it in a peer reviewed journal then it can’t possibly exist and then again told me to put Murdoch on phenobarbital.
Fortunately her partner vet B is much more open to thinking outside the box and told us to go for it.
We played around a bit with a few food choices and Murdoch’s seizures diminished to about one every three months. We also met a guy that claimed he had completely cured his dog’s epilepsy by putting his dog on a strictly raw meat diet. That would have been our next choice, but some interesting events happened next.
At the same time this was going on Murdoch also had what seemed like a chronic ear infection. The vets had him on a regime of pills/ear drops assuming that it was either a chronic bacteria or yeast infection. Eventually we made the suggestion to the vets to send out a swab for a culture. And guess what – it came back negative indicating to us that this was some sort of auto immune response which we suspected was likely again to food allergies and related to his epilepsy. Vet B agreed.
Vet A then shrugged and said she’d “look it up in the science journals” while vet B told us we could possibly be on to something and referred us to the neurology clinic at the University of Guelph vet school.
I took Murdoch to U of G for tests and to meet the head neuro honcho at the vet school and was expecting the worse from him about my theories regarding Murdoch’s food allergies and epilepsy but couldn’t believe what happened. The big guy of the department told me he has had a couple of dogs in with the same or similar condition. In one case a dog with epilepsy also had a chronic rash on his face and when he touched it in examination the dog went into an epileptic fit. He felt that what was happening was that Murdoch would scratch his ear and set off an epileptic fit. He didn’t know the mechanism of this but was planning on writing an article about it and speculated that it likely had something to do with food allergies. He then prescribed a specialized anti allergic dog food.
There were two young understudies at the U of G that gave us a big pat on the back for pursuing this avenue as did vet B. Vet A’s response was also predictable – “I want to wait until the clinical studies in a per reviewed journal come out”. Vet B now has another approach she would be willing to explore in future dog epilepsy cases. No doubt vet A will continue only to prescribe phenobarbital. We now will only take Murdoch to vet B.
Conclusion
We were prescribed a kangaroo/oat based dog food from a company called IAMS that in Ontario is only available by prescription. The rational for this is because this this food is kangaroo/oat based and Murdoch would never had these foods previously so if he really did have allergic related epilepsy then this dog food should eliminate them. It’s been three years and not only has Murdoch’s seizures completely disappeared but his ear issue was also gone very shortly after switching to this food. The obvious thing to do to figure out what was causing his seizures would be to introduce different foods one at a time until he has a seizure, but to be honest, we’re just not that scientifically curious so we’ll just keep Murdoch on this food exclusively.
It’s been three years and Murdoch has not had a single epileptic seizure. Vet B is a believer and Vet A is still a skeptic waiting for someone to write a study in a journal.
The bottom line is that if we had listened to Vet A and her rant about “lack of scientific studies in peer reviewed journals” then Murdoch would be still having epileptic fits as well as suffering from all the side effects of phenobarbital.
We thought outside of the box. It was an educated guess and I’ll admit we got lucky. I won’t speculate on the possible food allergy connection with epilepsy in humans, but when you think about the bigger picture there are no doubt a lot of people doctors just like vet A.
I hope there are a few veterinarians who will respond to this. Much more importantly I hope this post gives anybody who has a dog suffering from epilepsy a possible avenue to explore.
