Skip to content

Healing Success for Great Pyrenees Autoimmune Skin Disease

2016 March 29

Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine Gives Results When Steroids and Antibiotics Cannot

Crusted, bald, bloody swathes of sticky hot hairlessness crust this shaggy 100 pound Great Pyrenees' around his nose, eyes and mouth and some "private parts."

Max was sick for years. Specialists suspected pemphigus autoimmune skin disease.

What is wrong with Max?

Skin is healing. No more bleeding and crusts. Scars are inevitable!

Max had years of scabbing and bleeding at all the mucocutaneous (pronounced mew-ko-cue-tane-ee-us) junctions of his body. These are areas where haired skin meets the sensitive smooth lining skin at the nose, eyes, lips, anus, prepuce, and paw pads. They all hurt and cracked and bled. He spent much of his days asleep or rubbing his face along the walls to sooth himself. His people had taken him to nine (9) veterinarians in the few short years before he met Doc Truli, including board-certified dermatologists for dogs. Skin tests and cultures ruled out infections and common problems and skin surgical biopsies came back with inconclusive results. (This can happen, especially with long-term skin disease.) Specialists suspected Max suffered from autoimmune skin disease, such as pemphigus foliaceus (pronounced pem-fi-gus foal-ee-aa-shus) but could not prove it conclusively on any tests.

Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine Pattern Diagnosis (TCVM)

New Balance of Comfort- no scabs or bleeding!

Smooth soft new skin covers thepreviously gooey hot edges of skin by the nose, eyes, and lips of this Great Pyrenees gentle giant.

Part-way healed. See the pink healthy skin?

Excess Heat

We approached Max’s conditional from the perspective of Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine (TCVM). First, he clearly had too much “heat” in his body. Blood, red, hot, dry, panting, wanting to sleep in the air-conditioned house. According to TCVM, we needed to cool his energy.

Deficient Cooling

He was also deficient in his own internal ability to cool his body. As you can guess, normally, a body will balance the heat and cool. You can add or take off some clothing layers. Turn on the heat, or a fan. Drink iced-tea and eat watermelon, or drink hot chocolate and eat roasted lamb. We energetically balance our bodies all the time. In Max’s case, none of it helped. He just could not cool down and stop spontaneously bleeding. Why? He was deficient in his own internal cooling and moisturizing ability- called the yin energy in TCVM. Max needed his yin energy to balance the hot yang burning-up feeling he had. He just did not have enough internal cooling to manage to pull it off!

The yin What?

In TCVM, everything can be described in balanced terms of yin and yang. Yang is energetic, hot, fast, upward, strong, loud, summertime, teenage years, mid-day. Yin is quiet, dark, cool, solid (substantial), inward, night-time, old age, Winter.

How did we help Max decrease the heat and increase his internal cooling?

Max lays on his sofa during his acupuncture treatment

Max chills during his house call acupuncture

New skin and fur growth at all of the previously bleeding sore areas of skin.

Max’s nose, eyelids and muzzle are 100% healed

First, we simply stopped giving him foods that increase heat in the body.  Lamb, venison, shrimp, chicken. Especially chicken!

We added foods, Chinese herbal medicine, and acupuncture treatments to clear heat, boost cooling and moisturizing, treat pain, support the organ functions for detoxification and supporting normal balance and healing processes in the body. He became mostly vegetarian (like his humans), with specific foods and herbal formulas chosen to counter his particular imbalance.

I am not going to list his diet here because you need a licensed, experienced veterinarian who practices TCVM to do this right, the same way you need an experienced healer to help a women through symptoms associated with menopause. We learn from Max that TCVM can help in these seemingly hopeless situations. Reach out and find help from a TCVM veterinarian! In the Tampa Bay area, Dr Sandra Truli Springer would love to hear from you! (877-378-7854)

No comments yet

Leave a Reply

Note: You can use basic XHTML in your comments. Your email address will never be published.

Subscribe to this comment feed via RSS