Winter Kidneys: Keeping Your Dog Healthy In The Winter

Hi, this is Rita Hogan and welcome.

To the Dogs Are Individuals podcast. I'm a clinical canine herbalist and I've been practicing for over 20 years. This podcast is all about your dog.

Through an herbal lens.

So let's get to it and dive right in.

Hey everyone, Happy New Year. I hope you had a great holiday if you choose to celebrate such things. If not, I hope you had a great time relaxing. We are going into the New Year. I am in full pre sale for my book moments this whole month. Pre sales are super important for me so I'll be talking about pre sales in all my channels and all that stuff. Email, Facebook, Instagram, all of it in nauseam. If you've already purchased my book, just share with someone. Share with anyone that you feel would benefit from the Herbal Dog, which is my book and if you haven't, you can purchase it anywhere books are sold and it will arrive the first week of February. If you're in the United States, it arrives in March in Australia and I think late February, early March in the UK and Canada. I think it's February. So I wanted to start out by talking about the kidneys. So we need to gear up for kidney season. We are entering kidney season. It starts on the 21st, you know, approximately the 21st of December. Okay. It goes through the January and February and ends around March 21st. Then we go into liver season. And in my book the Herbal Dog, I wanted to reach you part of it because I'm going to start sharing different parts of my book. So let's just read. This is from page 102 and it is the chapter Everything Is Connected Talking Kidneys. When kidneys are unbalanced, function declines leading to high sodium levels, blood pressure issues, low volume blood filtering and fluid imbalance. If you pay attention to your dog's daily living patterns, you'll see the subtle symptoms of kidney weakness well before your dog's kidneys become impaired to the degree that their issues show up on blood work. Yes, getting blood work done for your dog annually or biannually is essential, but looking at body language can help you be proactive instead of reactive. There are obvious signs of kidney weakness like excess urination, incontinence and urinary tract infections. But there are more subtle indications too, some of which are seemingly unrelated, but all point to an unbalanced renal system. Remember, these symptoms are generally chronic, not acute. Kidney weakness. Cofactors and symptoms Arthritis aversion to touch on the lower back, cold energetics, constipation cruciate ligament tear Dandruff dental cavities, diarrhea, drinking more than they pee, dry cough, dry paw pads, dry stool, dry tongue, ear infections, edema, excessive itching, excessive salvation or excessive salvation, salivation, fear based behaviors, groaning when laying down, hot pause, lethargy, muscle twitching, nausea, an off smell, poor appetite, poor digestion, redness between the toes, rolling on the back, sensitivity to noise, spinal conditions, stiff joints, vomiting, water and weakness in the back end. All of those co factors are definitely signs that something's going on with your dog's kidneys. Okay, so I'm gonna continue on here a little bit and talk about the kidney spine connection. Many holistic veterinarians believe that the kidneys are directly related to a healthy spine, especially around the third lumbar vertebra. Vets like Cheryl Schwartz and Peter Debias both advocate for skeletal health, with Dr. Schwartz calling for acupuncture and acupressure, and Dr. Debias for acupuncture, chiropractic manipulation, and physiotherapy. These methodologies all release muscle tension, including tension in the spinal muscles, resulting in increased energy flow. When you understand the body holistically, it makes sense that these spinal considerations would improve kidney health as well. That is page 104 in the Kidney section of Everything is Connected in my herbal dog book. So hope you enjoyed that. Yeah, we're coming into kidney season. I did another podcast on this, so you can search kidneys in my podcast area and go over it. But we really need to pay attention to this. We need to pay attention to what's happening with the kidneys and what's going on. And kidneys can either have, they can have heat, okay. And then you're gonna see dryness and then like heat rises and there's a lack of moisture. Okay. And that can be related to like arthritis, joint pain, weak connective tissue. Healthy kidney function, like, really contributes to healthy bones musculoskeletal. So when kidneys wane in the wintertime, you can see these musculoskeletal conditions come about. There's more pain in the bones, there's more dental cavities happening. We want strong bones, we want strong teeth. So kidney heat, which can also be kidney congestion, imbalances these things out, right? And then it travels down to all parts of the urinary system. So we need to make sure that we have the UTI kit. Okay. And I'm just briefly go over it. What I use is urinary gold by pet wellbeing and and adored Beast Silver Hydrosol. Together, I Give a double dose of the pet wellbeing urinary gold. And I give three doses of the adored beast silver hydrosol per day. And I do it for 10 days. And then I also give good probiotics and prebiotics. Real mushrooms. I love reishi mushroom and tremella mushroom. For UTIs, you can also use marshmallow root. Real Mushrooms is one of our sponsors. Love, love, love them. They actually have signed on to sponsor my book tour. Thank you so much. Give them some love. Go to realmushrooms.com, check them out. Level of love. But their powders are excellent prebiotic to feed the microbiome during a urinary tract infection. The tremella mushroom is wonderful at soothing a UTI along with marshmallow root. So symptoms of heat in the kidney can be things like stones, gravel, rubbing the kidney area across the floor on the back. We're rubbing, we're rubbing, we're rubbing, we're rolling. Kind of. If you feel the kidney area, like, feel it. The kidney or bladder area could be warm. And then we can also have pain when a dog or cat is peeing and crying out. Okay, recently. And of course, we're hot into coming into the kidney season. And what does my cat Carl do? He blocks up. Mm. We were in the emergency room the other night. Carl's totally blocked. We had to go to another emergency room than the one I really like, and it was Blue Pearl. Enough said there. And, oh, my God, they were putting the fear in us so bad that I had to basically reach out to someone to help talk me off the ledge, slap myself in the face and get my shite together. I don't know. Whenever it's your own dog, everything, you know goes right out the window and you need help. Don't be afraid to ask for help. I had to. I texted a good friend of mine who's an emergency vet, Dr. Linda Louden. She has a thing called the Dog Mom Society. I'd highly recommend joining that. And you can find her on Facebook. Dr. Linda Loudon, DVM. She helped talk me off the ledge. Right. We took him home. They had to unblock him. You know, seventeen hundred dollars later, they had to unblock him. And I brought him home, and he's fine. He's still on his med regimen right now for another three days. But it was stress. We were doing housework, and male cats can get stressed and block up. I've never had a male cat do this, and I wasn't even aware of this situation. But now I am. Yep. Now I am. And it's good times. But. So you wanna. You wanna be ready, right? You want to see the signs? I didn't know the signs of a blockage. I thought Carl was getting uti. I used my UTI protocol. It didn't work. That's because he was inflamed because of stress. So no more construction around Carl. He's going to go to a different part of the house where you can't hear anything because, yeah, he's a little bit on the fearful side, which means that his kidneys need a little love. So for heat in the kidney, I like couch grass. I love deglycerized licorice root. Again, marshmallow root, tremella, plantain. They're nice cooling remedies for blood in the urine. I love yarrow. Yarrow is awesome for incontinence in the wintertime. I like to try mullein root first. Okay. Mullein root is excellent for incontinence in the wintertime. And then the opposite of heat in the kidneys is cold. Cold kidneys. Brr. Cold. When dogs or cats hold their urine, it can get pretty ugly. I mentioned that in my book. Pretty ugly. Stagnant urine thickens. Okay. And it just makes your dog uncomfortable. And with cats, stagnant urine can make their bladder explode if they don't pee. So it's good times. And I live kind of in a wet, cold, rainy area. It's in the Pacific Northwest. And it definitely can create some anxiety around potty time. Yeah. I mentioned in my book, I share a little story about Franth. I use a good th with that. Franth, my dog Frances, she didn't like to go out, but I talk about how I cleared that up real quick with some flower essences and wrapping her up. But, you know, urinary issues, a lot of the times they'll be accompanied with fear. Okay. And we don't want stagnation in the kidneys because blood isn't getting filtered like it should. And it can increase cold in the kidneys and toxicity and pathogenic overgrowth. We don't want that. And it decreases circulation, which causes water retention. Do you see the domino effect here? Right. There's a domino effect. And as dogs get older, this gets more and more prevalent. So for the most part, not all dogs. Dogs are individuals, but for the most part, this is the kind of things that can happen. And so we need to warm those kidneys up. When they're cold, we need to warm them up. I like calendula. Cordyceps mushroom. And most of these dogs have a cool, energetic, or a cold energetic. Ginger, goldenrod, reishi mushroom. Love it. And then gravel root, if there is gravel. Gravel root in small dosages. I cover dosages in my book. So pick up a copy. Yeah, no, I'm not begging. I'm not. But I'm merely suggesting, making the suggestion that you dig my book. You get into it, start reading it. Start putting your nerd hat on. Right. Don't be afraid to read. So a lot of people have a story I can't read. Yes, you can. Yes, you can. You can do it. But you can use my book as a reference, too, right? You can use it as a reference. Sometimes in the wintertime, kidneys get dry, and that can be related to heat, like I just talked about. But any pattern of kidney imbalance, cold or hot, can cause dryness. And again, you're gonna see a lot of fear with that. Okay, A lot of fear. And so I go through kidney issues in. In depth, in everything's connected in the herbal daug. But it's just important to really work with, like, infusions in the wintertime, Parsley infusion, nettle infusion, you know, lots of mushroom infusions. You can make an infusion with powdered mushroom, just mix it with water and put it over your dog's food. That's why I love real mushrooms for those types of things. Love that. You can also use, like, mushroom tinctures for more, you know, for, like, medicinal purposes, both real mushrooms and, like, a company called Myco Dog. Myco Dog's got some individual mushroom tinctures now, which I love. But mushroom tinctures are gonna be much more just medicinal. You know, you're not gonna get a lot of the prebiotic effects with glycerin extracted mushrooms. So, I mean, glycerin preserved mushrooms, they're extracted in alcohol and water first and then preserved in glycerin. So you could use a combination of both. The mushroom powders will give you a lot of good prebiotic effect as well as cooking mushrooms in the wintertime for you and your pup. For you and your pup. I find myself making the weirdest noises sometimes. And, you know, a long time ago, I used to get down on it. But no, my brain works a lot faster than my mouth. And you all know that pronunciation is not my forte. I had a lisp growing up because I had a jaw problem called an open jaw. I had upper and lower jaw surgery, and it fixed my jaw, but I still have some pronunciation issues. With things that are highly complicated and you know, the computer in my mouth doesn't really like to cooperate sometimes. I had someone school me on pronunciation a few times a couple months ago and I had to let them know like, hey, you know, my mouth doesn't always work in that way when there's certain syllables that come together. So they had to cut me some slack. Back to winter. So for cool to cold dogs and if you don't know what I'm talking about, take my energetics course. For cool to cold dogs, you really want to be mindful of keeping them warm in the winter. You know, ginger, calendula, turmeric, cordyceps, very warming for the body. And then you want to make sure that hot dogs don't get too hot with our inner heating systems. But you know, a warm to hot dog can get cold, it's winter. So if you live in a cold climate, they definitely can get cold. So it's kind of, you gotta be mindful of that. But they don't stay cold for very long. That's the key, right? That is the key. They don't stay cold, cold for very long. So just kind of keep observing your dogs, checking them out, seeing how things are going, trying to understand what's going on and then give a variety of foods. You know, digestion can be an issue in the wintertime. You can. And stress, you know, a lot of people are stressed during the holidays. They put a lot of pressure on themselves. They don't give themselves enough grace and ease to move around in their life and our dogs suffer. So you can get appetite suppression. You can also get an inability to digest food. So you know, you might want to do cooked food or gently cooked food with enzymes. Goodness gracious. They sponsor this lovely podcast and they have a lovely variety of gently cooked foods and freeze dried foods and snacks. Check them out at goodness gracious treats.com but I've been using one of their gently cooked diets with Faki Nubbins who has a little, she has a little bit of PTSD left from her eye removal and boy, that food has been a godsend for her. She doesn't eat it all the time. She eats it when her belly's upset and she can digest it, she doesn't puke it up. So these are all good things, right? Her belly gets, her tummy gets upset. So yeah, you might want to do home cooking. You might want to give your dog some variety. Just the biggest thing is pay attention to your stress, calm yourself down, practice square breathing. Love it. Look it up on Google. They have little square breathing exercises. Maybe take up some Tai chi or qigong in the wintertime. Here Chicken Gentle movement meditation techniques Guided meditation to help keep you calm Flower essences right Rescue remedy Aspen Marshmallow Sweet pea vine if you have trauma around the holidays. Borage calm free if you get super fearful and panicked. I love the go to by Adored Beast. I carry that in my store. It's lovely. I carry a lot of those flower essences as well. You want to just be proactive, not reactive and your dogs will feel so much better during the holidays. And for those dogs that have had a cruciate tear, right. If your dog has had a cruciate tear before, say they tore the one sided, didn't tear the other. You want to be really careful because dogs tend to injure their cruciate ligament after winter and because winter is a season of dryness and dryness tends to build up in the musculoskeletal system. So if your dog tore their cruciate you want to be mindful of dryness and tension and that's definitely you want to be mindful of stress, of how much stress you all have because that's really important because there's a musculoskeletal influence of the kidneys and that is expressed in a cruciate ligament tear. And cruciate tears need really good blood circulation and they need good lymphatic stimulation and elimination of metabolic waste with the liver. So be mindful of organ function. Go back to a couple of my podcasts on liver function and kidney function. So kidney moisture is important. Kidney dryness can be an issue. Again. Tremella and marshmallow root are an excellent way to deal with kidney dryness. Those are the ones I would go to first. Check them out. I carry both of those at my store Canine Herbalist. Speaking of that, I am going to be carrying not anytime soon, but towards the end of the year or even the middle of the year, I'm not positive I'm going to start carrying a lot more glycerits and I'm going to start carrying a lot more dried herbs. I'm working with a couple of farms right now to grow some herbs that I cannot grow on my property to get some good dried herbs and then some sourcing for herbs that are not grown in this country. So I'm working on that. In the meantime go to mountainroseherbs.com they're excellent source for dried herbs that are of excellent quality. And Hawaii farm has glycerites Hawaii farm p h a r m I believe.com Oregon's wild harvest I think Oshala Farms sells some herbs in Canada. There is Harmonic Arts and Herbies Herbs in the uk. I don't have those memorized. Australia I do not know but you could text McDowell's Herbs in Australia. McDowell's Herbals. They're awesome. So yeah, be mindful of the dryness and your dog as an individual.

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The content of this show is for educational and informational purposes only. It is not a substitute for veterinary care. This podcast doesn't constitute a provider patient relationship. As always, talk to your dog doctor, veterinarian or healthcare provider first before starting anything new. And that includes herbs. I'm not a doctor and I don't treat disease or prescribe anything. I'm a traditional herbalist providing herbal support education only. Regarding any products I may suggest the statements made regarding these products have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. The efficacy of these products has not been confirmed by FDA approved research. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. All information presented here on the podcast is not meant as a substitute or alternative to information from your vet. Please consult your veterinary professional about potential interactions or other possible complications before using any product.