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Weeks ago I wrote about my dog Chihiro’s problems with constant itching. She scratched and licked at herself much more than normal. We applied a couple different treatments to her in an attempt to fix the problem and now I am able to report on the results.
The first solution we attempted, which I described in greater detail in my previous article, was giving her probiotic treats and powder with her evening meal. The probiotics returned good bacteria to her body that had likely been wiped away by the antibiotics she took over the summer. After giving her the probiotics nightly for about a month, we noticed a drastic reduction in the amount of time Chihiro spent liking herself.
We’ve declared the probiotics a success, and now we’re weaning her off them by just giving her the treatments once a week until we stop doing so entirely. We still have about half of the probiotics left, so if she ever has another problem we can resume feeding them to her.
However, in order to cover all of our bases, we applied an additional treatment to Chihiro. After spending some time researching on the internet the various causes of problematic dog itching, my husband ordered two different types of shampoo. One focuses on fungal infections and one handles bacteria and microorganisms.
We bought these two shampoos specifically to treat Chihiro’s paws; in addition to all the itching she did all over, Chihiro had started licking her paws way more than usual. For two weeks every time we caught Chihiro spending too much time licking her paws, we gave her a bath. We applied one of the shampoos to her left feet and the other to her right feet.
After that, we paid attention to the paws on which our dog focused her ministrations. We soon determined that she mostly left alone the paws treated with the antifungal shampoo. Now we progressed to bathing her entirely in the antifungal shampoo whenever she itches or licks herself too much, a less frequent occurrence since we began her various treatments.
Of course, once we realized that the antifungal treatment was the most effective we wondered how Chihiro developed a fungal problem. There is a possibility that the colloidal oatmeal that’s part of the shampoo soothed whatever other problem Chihiro may have had, or that the problem she had was better tackled by the ingredients in an antifungal shampoo than an antibacterial, but we need to consider that she had some sort of fungal infection.
Whatever Chihiro had, it wasn’t too severe. Most canine skin fungal infections, like ringworm, are obvious. The lesions appear, easy to see, on the dog’s skin. We didn’t observe anything like that on Chihiro. So it might have only been a mild infection we didn’t even notice. Or maybe we just didn’t bathe her enough.
Chihiro didn’t get baths very often before. We only bathed her when she became dirty or smelly, which never happened often. Maybe we ought to have done so more frequently.
Still, no matter the cause, I’m glad that the itching saga has ended. Hopefully this is the last we’ll have to deal with health problems from Chihiro for a long while.
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