Dr. Conor Brady and Nick examine why a hypothyroid dog develops severe itching and inflamed skin after anesthesia. They suggest the dog's thyroid dysfunction increases sensitivity to anesthetic drugs or changes in gut bacteria, and recommend testing dried treats for thyroxine content and using Skin-Ease capsules to reduce inflammation.
My hypothyroidism dog has had 2 general anesthetics this year already, and each time he has had really itchy skin afterwards, and it takes a while to get back to normal with the help of Skin Ease capsules. Why does this happen to him? Why is the dog getting inflamed after his anesthetic?
Generally speaking, cats go hyper, dogs go hypo. The person to read on hypothyroidism, low thyroid in dogs, is Jean Dodds. She's written the book Canine Thyroid Epidemic, just there. And so that is the book to read. 40% of aggressive dogs in the United States are hypothyroid because your thyroid— I always think it's a bit like a thermostat, you know, the thermostat in your house. It's only a tiny little thing, but if you just tweak it slightly, your entire house, every room in the house changes temperature, and that's exactly how the thyroid works. And therefore, every cell in the body, they have a thyroid hormone receptor as well. So it means small or persistent changes in thyroid or insulin can have profound effects on the whole body.
People eat thyroid and they worry about it spiking, kind of causing hyperthyroidism, But I would say your dog is a whole prey eater. He eats tiny amounts of thyroid quite regularly. It's not a big deal to him. It's actually quite normal, probably extremely beneficial if you think about it. And I just wanted to put that bit in in case people are freaked out about eating thyroid.
If your vet turns around to you and said you've got hyperthyroidism in your dog, then you need to think about, well, the food, the food, which is all the more reason to feed variety. Okay. Yeah.
Dried treats. I think dried treats are dangerous because treats want the cheapest meat possible. Once it's dried out, you have no idea what it is. So beef is beef. They don't have to tell you what organ it is. They don't have to tell you what part of the beef it is. If my dog has hypothyroidism, great tip, Nick, I'd be keeping that treat and getting it analyzed. Send it to the vet and say, tell me how much thyroxine is in this product.
So to the question, dog got 2 general anesthetics and she's itchy after it.
So what's going on there?
When you have a general anesthetic, GA, You are pumped with toxins. The dog has a degree of sensitivity to something in those anesthetics. Drugs rarely come on their own. They usually have excipients, which is a posh way of saying other stuff in the liquid. And you may not be sensitive to the protagonist, the star of the show. You may be allergic to the walk-on part who came in as part of that medication. So that would be number one. Maybe there was some kind of disruption of the biome. Yeah, the toxin goes in, but the bugs are not happy. Or maybe if the dog— I'm just thinking out loud here— maybe if the dog was in for a day or two, then they would have been— what they would have been feeding it, God knows what they're going to feed it. Usually they're feeding, you know, Hills or Royal Canin or something like this. And if that's unfamiliar to the dog, then that might be it. The Skin-Ease capsules, they're really, really great. They're really useful. I use them a lot. I import them from the States and it is not a panacea. It's not, you've got an itchy dog, here's some herbs, dog stops itching for life forever. However, it is one of the tools that we use when we are presented with itchy dogs. And I would say in about 40% of cases, it's a very useful tool. So we stock it now, we are going to be starting the holistic vet shop. And so you'll be able to get hold of this if you, if you need it.
