skin pimples -- sos!

[Spinyniner]

Hello, my white Frenchie Molly has had these skin pimples on her belly/ groin area for months. She also has little growths under the hair on her back, side and butt areas. The vet keeps on prescribing antibiotics for the skin pyoderma/ impetigo, antibiotic shampoo, but this has been going on now for almost 3 months. I don't think it is healthy to keep a puppy on anibiotics for 3 months, especially since this is not making the puppy acne go away? Does anyone have any solutions for this?

I was frustrated at my vet, after like 5 visits, and over $700 of treatments, and then she suggested food allergies, and put poor Molly on the Science Diet d/d, which she does not really like. She used to be on raw food, but for the past 2 weeks, she's been eating the Science Diet. This is not really working either.

Does anyone know what this can be caused by in Frenchies? I am about to take her to an allergist, but I don't think it's necessarily an allergy...

[imogene]

did your vet ever take a swab and do a culture to diagnose the infection. It is pretty important to do a culture with chronic pyoderma. You have to be very proactive about keeping the skin healthy and getting chronic pyoderma or bacteria including Staph or yeast can really become a problem. As far as it being an allergy if your dog has a food allergy and you are treating the symptoms of the allergy with antibiotics without removing the allergen in the diet - the symptoms will keep coming back.

In your place the your best bet would be to do an elimination diet. The easiest way to do an elimination diet is with raw, but I would not recommend starting a raw diet if there is any chance you dog has a less than normal immune system. To that end I would use something like the Evo 95% canned food with a protein like venison or duck. Or do a home based diet using an a-typical protein and unusual starch like quinoa or potato.
It is recomended to feed one thing for up to 3 week. With Belzie it took 12 weeks for her to show symptoms.

I would also got see either a dermatologist or an allergy specialist. We ended up testing her for dietary allergies and then doing the elimination diet based on the test results. It took about 3 months to get her healthy and doing well on cooked food, and then I switched her to a raw diet and she has been doing well ever since. It can take a long time to get an allergy dog stable. In our case it took 18 months of having chronic pyoderma, and chronic yeast infections - she also got very sick twice - the last time we came close to losing her. She has be stable and healthy for 18 months appicon

[Spinyniner]

Dear Imogene and family,
Thank you for the post. In addition to the antibiotics, the vet suggested Science Diet dog food d/d for food allergies, so we have Molly our dog on that. I did not know that we can do the raw food diet for allergy testing also. We just took her off the raw food diet to switch to the Science Diet, so maybe we try using your formula. I plan to take Molly to an allergist.

I had no idea that chronic pyoderma is dangerous. She gets them all the time on her tummy, and also all over the back and sides. She does not itch though... poor thing.

Thanks again, and I hope I can write again to follow up with you.

Ellie, Molly's mom

[Spinyniner]

Oh, and I forgot to add that the vet did do a skin culture, and that came back okay. Aside from switching the food to the Science Diet, they really did not seem to know what else to do...