Anxiety Cases

I have just rescued a cute 7 mo old Whippet mix from the shelter. She has separation anxiety and is very hyper. She also pees everyday on the tile floor in my kitchen. Consequently she is not permitted in any other part of the house as she has peed on the carpet in my bedroom and my office. Can you recommend any herbs to help with Rosie's anxiety and hyperness.  And how do I handle the deliberate peeing, even after she has been outside to go potty.   Thank you.

Dr. Steve's Advice - it's important to get Rosie's urine checked for a bladder infection. They are very common in young dogs and are a common cause of the 'deliberate peeing' behaviour you're seeing.

Once you've ruled that out, I think the easiest safest approach is to use a combination of Lift the Qi (Galvanex from Gold Standard Herbs) and Harmonize the Qi. These are both Kan Essentials formulas and can often be found online, such as on Amazon, if your vet won't carry them. If your vet is game, ask them to get the Natural Path equivalents: Bu Zhong Yi Qi Tang (Ginseng and Astragalus) and Xiao Chai Hu Tang (Minor Bupleurum) as the granules can be a little stronger than the pills or tinctures. If your vet is not interested, though, then get the Kan products.

The use of the two formulas together constitutes a shotgun approach to urinary incontinence, since it treats almost all the various physiological events that can cause it. It hopefully will work for you, and reduce the separation anxiety to boot. You can also use them in tandem with any antibiotics to help bladder infections resolve faster, while helping protect against dysbiosis.

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Hi! I'm new to this group. I recently joined because my 4.5yr old Westie suffers from extreme anxiety. I saved her  from a puppy mill at 2months old. I socialized her when I first got her. As she's gotten older I noticed she was getting fearful outdoors. I've tried many things CBD, calming chews, hemp chews herbal medicine and trainers. Nothing seems to help her. I'm at my wits end

Dr. Steve's Advice - it's important to make sure an animal acting fearfully has no hidden sources of pain, like chiropractic fixations especially. Your animal may act normally even when these are occurring, because they can avoid aggravating them as long as they move carefully. In uncontrolled situations, however, like outdoors or around other dogs, careful movement is not a given, and they know it. So they become anxious that something could happen and they could experience pain as a result.

In fact, any undiagnosed medical condition can have your animal not feeling confident, and anxious in new uncontrolled situations as a result. If your dog hasn't been to the vet in quite a while, now is a good time.

Processed foods can also contribute to anxiety, by interfering with the normal synthesis of tryptophan, depending on what is in the food. They also make the microbiome less diverse. If the wrong species end up growing in the gut, they produce metabolites that can greatly heighten anxiety in animals and people. So think about giving a fresh food diet.

There are many herbal formulas in Chinese medicine that can dramatically and quickly improve anxiety. A visit to a local holistic veterinarian can help you choose the one most likely to help your dog.

If you don't have a holistic vet in your area, consider trying Halscion (https://goldstandardherbs.com/products/Original-Halscion-85g-p647327436) by Gold Standard Herbs. For dogs with severe anxiety, it can be especially helpful

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We rescued a GSD about 3 months ago, he is approx 10-11 months old…Finnegan is his new name. He has had a crappy start in life; neglect, abuse and who knows what else.  He has settled in nicely with us in the house and our other dog and 2 cats but as soon as we take him out of the house, he is overcome with anxiety and becomes reactive to vehicles, other animals and sometimes people. We have been working with a trainer to help work through this…it is an incredibly SLOW process…kinda breaks my heart! Along with his reactivity issues, we are struggling to help him gain weight. Initially he was skin and bones…he started to fill in abit with his new diet consisting of raw/whole food diet and a ton of treats but he seems to have stalled out. His ribs are easily seen as well as his coccyx bones…he is definitely too skinny still.  He was treated for worms when he first came to our home (never tested to confirm if he had them), we did end up recently having him neutered 3 weeks ago to help with some of the behavior issues to have the hormone variable out of the picture. Our vet is aware of the issue that Finn isn’t putting in much weight and feels that it may be due to his anxiety and as he works through this and after his neuter she expects he will start to gain weight. Is there anything you can recommend we try to help this guy along with getting some weight on?…

Meet Finn!…

Dr. Steve's Advice - usually when a dog can't maintain its weight on raw, it has a more 'carb dependent' body economy. Adding cooked barley or oats to make up, say, 1/6 of the food in the dish usually is enough to have them start gaining weight.

The behaviour extremes are also likely to benefit from that diet change. More carbs supports certain species in the microbiome that otherwise vanish on pure raw diets. A happy more diverse microbiome means more normal body functioning, from the GI to the immune system to the joints to the brain. Recent research has uncovered not just a role of the brain (and cortisol) in affecting the microbiome, but a crucial role of the microbiome in fostering normal brain development while relieving tendencies to anxiety and depression.

To speed those changes along and foster an ideal bacteria community in the gut, talk to your holistic veterinarians about giving you some Bu Zhong Yi Qi Tang (Ginseng and Astragalus) and Xiao Chai Hu Tang (Minor Bupleurum). They should rapidly reduce that tendency to over-the-top anxiety and hypervigilance that happens when the dog is off your property.

Hope that helps!

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My lab has severe anxiety and especially with thunder. I have tried everything you can imagine to help. None of it is fast acting. My husband will be getting a new job and not working from home. The problem is a thunder storm. Once he was in his crate and there was an unexpected storm.....he lost 4 teeth trying to get out. If he is not in the crate and nobody is home, he will destroy the house trying to escape. I'm just grasping to straws in hope of a magic answer.

Dr. Steve's Advice - for severe anxiety in dogs, probably the first thing to try is Halscion (https://goldstandardherbs.com/products/Original-Halscion-85g-p647327436) by Gold Standard Herbs. It's not like a drug where you use it only when you need it. The idea behind the product is to more permanently remove the phobia. If he is anxious at any other times, you may see improvements there as well. Once he is less anxious, he will be more amenable to whatever behaviour therapists might try to desensitize or re-train him. Hopefully this helps.

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My Layla will be 14 in December. Loves to swim!  Can stay in the pool for hours. My problem is she suffers from some cognitive Dysfunction and pants and paces all around the house a good amount of time. What can I give her to relax?

Dr. Steve's Advice. - welcome to our group. Halscion from Gold Standard Herbs was invented for dogs like yours. Scroll down to the testimonials section on the Halscion page (https://goldstandardherbs.com/products/Original-Halscion-85g-p647327436). You'll see reports of how it worked in other dogs just like yours. It's the first thing I'd try.

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This is Diesel, he’s 2 years old and he’s a Lab x Golden mix. Diesel has always been a dog with a medium-low energy level, anxious and insecure. He’s reactive with strangers and noises. When he was around 1 year old we started to think that he drooled excessively and had an inconsistent pattern in his stools, that is, his stools have some shape at the beginning but in the end they are more pasty and at the end of the day, on the walk, after doing a normal poop, he usually has a little intestinal discharge with liquid stools. He did 15 days of metronidazol and the liquid discharged stopped, than started again when he was off of it. I don't see much difference using probiotics because the usual pattern remains even when we’re using it. 

Diesel has always been skinny and sometimes shows low appetite. Now he also seems to suffer from some gastric reflux, burps frequently and eats a lot of herbs on the street. 

We've been investigating.. we did analyzes that came back normal, b12 and normal folates, ultrasound, TLi analysis and cPL Snap (to rule out EPI and pancreatitis). In the ultrasound, the vet mentioned that he has small adrenal glands for his size and weight, which may indicate Addison but she does not think it is necessary to do other tests for now (didn't seem to think it would be Addison from the symptoms). Still, we asked to test electrolytes that come back normal.  

My questions are:

- Could this stool pattern and symptoms above be related to anxiety or is there likely to be some other issue here? Many people say that stress can increase bowel motility during walks but I wonder if that's the case, what can I do to help? Or will it always be like this?

- Could any of these symptoms be related to a malfunction of the adrenal glands? Or is the fact that they are small not necessarily cause for alarm? I don't know if I should start preventing something. 

- We are going to start introducing a raw diet but we have some fear that he also has some food allergy (simply because we don't know what he has in fact) and that we can do worse. What do you recommend to facilitate the transition for Diesel?

Thank you very much in advance.

Dr. Steve's Advice - First, if the Na:K ratio in the bloodwork is <<28 or so, then the small adrenals are an issue and have to factor into treatment. Have your vet check that. Anxiety can likewise factor into the digestive tract challenges, via the brain-gut-skin axis. You don't mention skin issues, but they are a common manifestation of the kind of dynamic you're dealing with. They may show eventually.

Rather than see all these things as causally linked, Chinese medicine views them as concomitant. They are all manifesting as an outcropping of a deeper problem which otherwise remains hidden. In your dog's case, the underlying issue appears to be a Shao Yang disharmony.

Without going into too much detail, the Shao Yang is the structure in the body that regulates digestive tract function. It is like the master control switch for it. If it malfunctions you can get problems like:
- colitis which is often amenable to metronidazole, etc.
- regurgitation
- abnormal peristalsis regulation, such that stools come through faster than they should to create the 'normal at the beginning, soft at the end' look
- resistance to probiotics, which also need adequate mucosal immunity to oust pathogenic bacteria so the probiotics can 'take root'. The Shao Yang partly controls that local immune response

Shao Yang disharmony has other manifestations, too, including adrenal issues (Cushing's, Addison's) and often pronounced anxiety and fear aggression. In short, it seems to be the issue with your dog.

The first step is to treat on that basis, using something like Harmonize the Qi from Kan Essentials, which is a version of Minor Bupleurum. Dose according to the guidelines at https://nphc.ca/using/dosage. If you see improvements, then you can take comfort in knowing we understand the problem well, such that a diet change can likely be made safely, as long as it also addresses the same diagnosis.

Diets that treat Shao Yang disharmonies are real food meat-and-vegetable diets, containing sufficient carbs and fiber to feed the probiotics being administered. You'd need at least 15% vegetables, beans or fruit mixed with the meat portion to provide that support. Meanwhile, get the Minor Bupleurum going and let us know what happens

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