19/08/2026
Copied and pasted. Some very good information on whats causing skin allergies
I’m going to say something no dog owner wants to hear, and I honestly do not care if it upsets you.
Switching to yet another bag of grain-free food is not going to save your dog.
Not Hill’s. Not Royal Canin. Not that R2,700 veterinary food your vet recommended last week. Not raw food. Not freeze-dried food. Not that expensive brand the woman at the dog park swears by.
NONE OF IT IS GOING TO WORK.
I know because I tried everything. Every brand. Every protein source. Every elimination diet. For three years.
And my dog died anyway.
Eight years old. Kidney failure.
Because I spent three years treating an allergy problem that was never an allergy problem.
And the worst part?
My other dog started showing the same symptoms.
The same itching. The same bottom scooting. The same dull coat. The same restless nights.
And I nearly let it happen again because I was still listening to the same advice that killed my first dog.
I am finished being polite about this.
If your dog has chronic symptoms and you are in the comments asking which food you should try next, you are wasting time your dog does not have.
Read this entire post.
Every single word.
Because the answer is here, and it is NOT another bag of dog food.
My name is Sarah. I am 38 years old. I am a registered veterinary nurse and have worked at the same small-animal clinic outside Cape Town for fifteen years.
I am the person who runs the stool tests.
I am the person who holds the dogs while the vet draws blood.
I am the person who sits on the floor with frightened owners while they cry.
I have spent fifteen years telling other people what is wrong with their dogs.
And I missed it in my own.
Bear was an eight-year-old German Shepherd cross that I rescued from a shelter outside Stellenbosch when he was two.
Large black mask. White star on his chest.
The kind of dog who leaned his entire body weight against your leg when you were having a bad day, as though he could feel it.
Bodhi is a four-year-old German Shepherd cross.
Grey. Quieter. Follows me from room to room. Sleeps with his head resting on my foot.
Two completely different dogs.
But they had the same problem.
Both scratched.
Both dragged their bottoms across the floor.
Both paced around the house at 03:00 in the morning.
For Bear, it began about three years ago.
He came inside from the garden and immediately started chewing his paws.
The tops. The sides. Between the toes.
Until they were pink, damp and smelled like corn chips.
I asked the vet I work for about it.
“Probably an environmental allergy. Try an allergy-friendly food. Switch to something with limited ingredients. Salmon and sweet potato usually works.”
So I changed his food.
For the first ten days, the chewing eased slightly.
Then it came back.
Even worse.
His paws became red and swollen. Hot to the touch.
He began developing bald, flaky patches on his stomach.
The vet, my own boss, a woman I trust completely, put him on Apoquel.
After two weeks, the chewing stopped.
I thought: finally.
Problem solved.
Three months later, the chewing returned.
The same paws. The same patches on his stomach.
Plus a new symptom.
He started dragging his bottom across the carpet.
Several times a day.
We emptied his a**l glands at the clinic.
Twice. Three times. Four times.
The scooting came back within a week after every treatment.
Then he started pacing at night.
Not every night.
But perhaps three nights a week, I would hear his claws clicking against the wooden floor at 02:47.
He walked from the bedroom to the kitchen, to the lounge, then back to the bedroom.
Over and over again.
As though he could not settle inside his own body.
I posted in a Facebook group for veterinary nurses.
“My own dog. Three years of paw chewing, bottom scooting and now pacing at night. Apoquel works for a few months and then stops. Food changes do not help. What am I missing?”
Everyone had a suggestion.
“Try a Cytopoint injection. It lasts four to eight weeks.”
“Ask for a referral to a veterinary dermatologist.”
“It could be food or environmental. Have you done a twelve-week elimination diet?”
“My dog had the same problem. We did an intradermal skin test. It cost R14,000, but it was worth it.”
So I tried everything.
I followed the elimination diet for twelve weeks.
I added Cytopoint on top of the Apoquel.
I paid R14,000 for skin-prick testing that showed reactions to dust mites and three different types of grass.
I bought immunotherapy serum.
I kept a HEPA air purifier running in the bedroom twenty-four hours a day.
I spent more than R45,000 over three years treating Bear’s “allergies”.
He still scratched.
He still scooted.
He still paced at night.
And then Bodhi started doing the same thing.
He had always been healthy.
Glossy coat. No problems.
The kind of dog you would photograph for the front of a dog-food bag.
But about six months ago, he started licking his paws.
Only a little at first.
After walks.
I thought he had stepped in something.
Then it started happening every night.
Then he began dragging his bottom across the carpet.
Then he started pacing at 03:00, exactly like Bear.
I knew.
The second I saw him drag his bottom over the carpet, I knew.
Whatever had been wrong with Bear was now wrong with Bodhi too.
But by then, Bear was deteriorating quickly.
His coat had gone from glossy black to dull and dusty.
He had lost more than a kilogram without me noticing.
He stopped jumping into the back of the car. I had to lift him in.
He stopped meeting me at the door.
He stopped leaning against me.
He just slept.
On the cool kitchen tiles.
Barely moving.
My boy was disappearing in front of me, and I was a veterinary nurse who had no idea why.
I took him to the clinic.
“Blood tests. Full panel. Today.”
The results came back the following afternoon.
I was sitting in the staff room when my boss walked in holding the printout.
“Sarah. Sit down.”
I knew before she said it.
“His creatinine is 360. His urea is 28. His SDMA is 32. Sarah… Bear has stage-three kidney failure.”
I dropped my coffee.
“He is eight. He is eight years old. How can he have kidney failure?”
She looked at me with the same expression I had watched her give hundreds of pet owners.
“Sometimes it just happens. We need to begin kidney-support treatment immediately. Subcutaneous fluids. Renal food. We may be able to buy him some time.”
“How much time?”
“Months. Perhaps a year if we do everything.”
I went home and sat on the kitchen floor.
Bear came over and placed his head in my lap.
His coat felt like straw beneath my hand.
I started feeding him Royal Canin Renal that same evening.
He refused to eat it.
I tried warming it.
Mixing in low-sodium broth.
Hand-feeding him from my fingers as though he were a puppy.
He took two bites and walked away.
Over the next eight weeks, Bear lost several more kilograms.
His eyes sank into his skull.
His gums became pale.
He stopped drinking unless I held the bowl in front of him.
Then, on a Tuesday in October, I came home from work at 18:14 and found him in the laundry room.
He was breathing incorrectly.
Fast and shallow.
I carried him to the car and drove to the animal hospital, a place I had visited hundreds of times through my work.
The receptionist saw my face and waved me straight through.
Forty minutes later, the vet came out.
“His kidneys are functioning at less than ten per cent. He is septic. Sarah, I am so sorry. We can keep him comfortable, but he is not going home.”
I stayed with him on the floor of the consultation room until 23:47.
I held his head while they gave him the injection.
The last thing he did was lean against me.
Even at the end.
Even while his body was shutting down.
He pressed his weight against my leg one final time.
I drove home with an empty collar on the passenger seat.
I do not remember much about the following two weeks.
But I remember this:
Every time Bodhi licked his paws, my chest tightened.
Every time he dragged his bottom across the carpet, I felt like vomiting.
Every time I heard his claws against the wooden floor at 03:00, I lay in bed staring at the ceiling and thinking:
It is happening again.
It is happening again, and I am a bloody veterinary nurse and I still do not know what to do.
So I did what I should have done three years earlier.
I became obsessed.
I stopped reading veterinary forums and started reading research papers.
I read everything I could find about chronic symptoms in dogs that did not respond to standard treatment.
I read parasitology textbooks I had not opened since college.
I read ESCCAP monitoring data.
I read studies in journals I had never even heard of.
And I saw the same pattern appearing again and again.
Dog develops chronic itching → owner changes food → no improvement → vet prescribes Apoquel → works for several months → stops working → vet prescribes Cytopoint → works for several months → stops working → owner pays for allergy testing → begins immunotherapy → mild improvement at best → years pass → coat becomes dull → weight begins dropping → kidney values slowly start rising on blood tests → kidney failure.
The itching was not an allergy.
It was the very first warning sign.
And I had ignored it for three years because that was what I had been trained to do.
Then, buried inside a 2018 study published in a Slovak veterinary journal, I found a paragraph that made me stop completely.
It described a population of dogs living in rural Eastern Europe.
Farm dogs. Working dogs. Herding dogs.
Almost no chronic skin conditions.
Almost no behavioural disorders.
Almost no kidney disease before fourteen years of age.
The only common factor:
Every autumn, the farmers gave their dogs wild-harvested wormwood.
*Artemisia absinthium.*
Harvested at the foot of the Carpathian Mountains.
For parasites.
I sat at my kitchen table at 01:00 and said aloud to the empty room:
“My God.”
Because I had been a**lysing stool samples for fifteen years.
I had been telling owners that their dogs were “negative” for fifteen years.
And I knew, every veterinary nurse knows, that standard flotation testing misses up to 50% of whipworm infections and up to 75% of Giardia infections.
The tests are not designed to detect subclinical parasite burdens.
They are designed to identify acute infections.
Bear’s stool tests had come back negative every single year.
That did not mean he did not have parasites.
It only meant the test could not find them.
At 01:30, I went onto Amazon and bought the first wormwood drops I could find.
R320.
Four-star reviews.
“Natural dewormer for dogs.”
They arrived two days later.
I started giving them to Bodhi that same day.
One dropper in his food, twice a day, exactly according to the label.
Week one:
Still scooting.
Still licking his paws.
Week two:
Still scooting.
Still licking his paws.
Week three:
Still scooting.
Still licking his paws.
And now he had started scratching his ears.
Damp, ye**ty ears with a sweet smell.
I sat on the patio one Sunday afternoon, watching him chew his paw, and started crying.
I was watching the same thing happen again.
That was when Dr Petra Kovaříková came over.
Petra is the new vet at our clinic.
She started working with us about a year ago.
Czech. In her fifties.
She moved to South Africa fifteen years ago after spending twenty years working in mixed veterinary practices in rural Slovakia and the Czech Republic.
She rents the small cottage behind my house.
We share a fence.
She had been pulling w**ds in her garden and noticed that I was crying.
She walked through the gate without asking.
Sat down on the patio step beside me.
Said nothing for a while.
Then she said:
“Tell me about him.”
I told her everything.
About Bear.
About Bodhi.
About three years of Apoquel, Cytopoint, elimination diets and immunotherapy.
About the kidney failure.
About the wormwood study and the Amazon drops that were not working.
She listened without interrupting.
When I finished, she asked to see the bottle.
I handed it to her.
She turned it over.
Read the label.
Read it again.
Then she made a small sound, somewhere between a sigh and a laugh.
“Sarah. This is rubbish.”
“What do you mean?”
She placed the bottle on the wooden deck.
“Your study was correct. The wormwood. The farm dogs. All of it. It is not folk medicine. It is pharmacology. The active compound is thujone. It is one of the only natural substances capable of breaking down biofilm.”
“Biofilm?”
She nodded.
“When parasites colonise the intestinal tract, they do not simply sit there. Within days, they create a protective mucus layer known as biofilm. It is a polysaccharide matrix that shields them from immune cells, digestive enzymes and almost every deworming treatment on the market.
“That is why ordinary treatments fail.
“You are not killing the parasites. You are treating the symptoms while they continue multiplying behind the shield.”
“And thujone pe*****tes it?”
“At a sufficiently high concentration, yes. Thujone pe*****tes the biofilm, breaks down the matrix and exposes the parasites at every stage of life: eggs, larvae and adults.
“Then they die.
“Then the toxins are flushed out.
“Then the intestinal lining can heal.
“Then the chronic symptoms stop: the itching, the scooting, the pacing at night.
“Because they were never allergies.
“They were inflammatory reactions to parasites your stool tests could not detect.”
I picked up the Amazon bottle.
“Then why is this not working?”
Petra took it from me again.
“Because this is cultivated wormwood. Industrially farmed. Probably grown at low altitude in China. The thujone concentration in that raw material is between 0.1 and 0.2%.
“To pe*****te biofilm, you need at least 0.85%.
“This bottle is barely stronger than tea.
“You could give him the entire bottle every day and it still would not break through the shield.”
“How do you know that number?”
She smiled, but it was a sad smile.
“Because my grandmother grew it.
“Real wormwood.
“*Polín pravý.*
“At the foot of the Carpathian Mountains, six hundred metres above sea level, harvested late in autumn after the second frost.
“That is when the thujone concentration is highest.
“Every farm dog in our village received it.
“Every autumn.
“None of them had what your dogs have.
“It took me ten years of practising in South Africa to understand why.”
I stared at her.
“Are you saying my entire profession is missing this?”
“I am saying your entire profession is trained to suppress symptoms using patentable molecules.
“There is no patent on a w**d growing on a Slovak mountainside.
“There is no quarterly earnings report attached to a plant my grandmother harvested using a sickle.
“So nobody studies it.
“Nobody recommends it.
“And dogs like Bear die of kidney failure at eight years old while their owners spend R45,000 on allergy investigations.”
She handed the bottle back to me.
“This one, throw it away.
“It is worse than useless because it makes you believe you have already tried.”
“So what do I do?”
She stood up.
“Wait here.”
She walked through the gate and returned five minutes later holding a small amber dropper bottle.
A Vermipaws label.
She placed it on the patio between us.
“I started recommending this six months ago after sending it to the laboratory in Prague where my brother still works.
“Third-party tested.
“0.85% thujone, verified.
“Made using wormwood from the same region of the Carpathians where my grandmother harvested it.
“Combined with five other antiparasitic herbs and a veterinary-grade probiotic, so you rebuild the gut while clearing it.
“It is the only product available in South Africa that I have found that meets the required standard.”
“And it works?”
“Of forty-three dogs with chronic symptoms that I have treated over the past six months, thirty-nine became completely or almost completely symptom-free within eight weeks.
“The other four experienced partial improvement.
“Zero side effects.
“No prescriptions.
“No symptom suppression.
“Only proper parasite elimination at a cellular level.”
“Why did you not tell me about this before?”
She looked at me for a long time.
“Because you are a veterinary nurse, Sarah.
“You have spent fifteen years telling pet owners that allergies are allergies and that chronic itching is caused by the environment.
“I did not think you would listen.
“I am sorry.
“I should have tried.”
I started giving Bodhi Vermipaws Parasite Cleanse Drops that same evening.
One millilitre in his food, once a day.
Days one to five:
No change.
Day six:
He scooted twice instead of his usual five times.
Day eight:
He did not pace at 03:00 for the first time in months.
Day eleven:
I came home after a twelve-hour shift and his paws were dry.
Not pink.
Not damp.
Not chewed raw.
Dry.
Week three:
No bottom scooting.
No pacing.
No paw licking.
Week five:
His coat changed.
The dusty appearance disappeared.
He developed a subtle shine I had not seen since he was one year old.
Week eight:
I took him to the clinic for a full blood panel.
Kidney values: perfect.
Liver values: normal.
Inflammatory markers: reduced across the board.
My boss read the results twice.
“Whatever you are doing, keep doing it.”
That was four months ago.
Bodhi has not scooted for four months.
He has not chewed his paws raw.
He has not paced at night.
He sleeps all the way through until 06:00.
He chases squirrels.
He leans against me when I have had a bad day.
He does exactly what Bear used to do.
He is healthy.
But Bear is gone.
And every day, I think about what I missed.
For three years, his body was screaming at me.
The paw chewing was inflammation caused by toxins in the gut.
The bottom scooting was re**al inflammation caused by parasites.
The nighttime pacing was a serotonin disruption caused by an imbalance in the gut flora.
The dull coat was caused by poor nutrient absorption.
The weight loss came from systemic inflammation.
And the kidney failure?
The kidneys are filters.
Every day, they filtered the toxins released by the parasites into Bear’s bloodstream.
Every day for three years.
They did not fail because he was old.
They failed because they had been working overtime since he was five.
By the time my own blood tests detected the problem, 90% of his kidney function had already been destroyed.
The vet should have found it.
I should have found it.
Petra should have said something sooner.
But the system is designed to miss it.
The stool tests miss it.
The elimination diets miss it.
Apoquel suppresses the symptoms so effectively that everyone forgets there was ever an underlying cause.
I am writing this because I see the same posts in veterinary nursing groups every single week.
“My dog has been taking Apoquel for two years and the itching is back.”
“My dog keeps scooting even though we have had the a**l glands emptied.”
“My dog paces at 03:00 and the vet says it is only anxiety.”
“My dog’s coat is dull no matter which food I try.”
“I spent R27,000 on allergy testing and my dog is still scratching.”
You are not doing anything wrong.
The food is not the problem.
The allergy investigation will not find it.
Your dog has a subclinical parasite burden multiplying behind biofilm in the intestinal tract.
A standard stool test misses up to 75% of it.
Apoquel suppresses the inflammation so that you stop noticing it.
But every day, the parasites release toxins.
Every day, the kidneys filter those toxins.
Every day, the intestinal lining breaks down.
Every day, your dog moves closer to where Bear’s life ended.
And here is what Petra told me that I think about every night.
Eighty-five per cent of South African dog parks test positive for parasites.
ESCCAP data shows that hookworm infections have increased by 45% since 2012.
If your dog has ever visited a dog park, walked on grass where another dog has been, drunk from a shared water bowl or sniffed another dog’s bottom, and of course it has, then your dog has been exposed.
Subclinical parasite burden is not a rare diagnosis.
It is the normal condition for South African dogs.
Nobody is allowed to say it out loud because there is no patent on the w**d that fixes it.
You can give 0.85% Carpathian thujone every day indefinitely without harming your dog.
The body uses what it needs and eliminates the rest.
There is no toxicity at the therapeutic dose.
There are no withdrawal symptoms.
It does not create dependency.
But if your dog is one of the 85% that has been exposed, which it is, then you could be the difference between kidney failure at eight years old and a fifteen-year-old dog still leaning against you.
Do not wait for the blood tests to find it.
By the time the blood tests find it, it is already too late.
I wasted three weeks using wormwood from Amazon.
Three weeks during which the inflammation in Bodhi’s body continued.
Three weeks during which his kidneys continued filtering toxins.
Three weeks I will never get back.
Petra tested every wormwood product available on the South African market.
The one her brother’s laboratory in Prague verified as containing 0.85% Carpathian thujone, combined with a proper probiotic and five supporting antiparasitic herbs, was Vermipaws Parasite Cleanse Drops.
One millilitre.
In the food.
Once a day.
Within four to six weeks, the biofilm breaks down.
The parasites die.
The intestinal lining heals.
The inflammation decreases.
The chronic symptoms, the itching, scooting, pacing and dull coat, disappear.
Bodhi has not scooted for four months.
His kidney values are perfect.
He is leaning against me right now while I write this.
But Bear is gone.
And I will spend the rest of my life wishing I had opened that Slovak journal three years earlier.
Your dog is not scratching because of allergies.
Your dog is not scooting because of its a**l glands.
Your dog is not pacing because of anxiety.
Your dog has subclinical parasites that your vet’s tests cannot detect, and every day you wait places more strain on its kidneys.
Do not let your dog become Bear.
👉 https://www.tankade.com/ver32-za/adv
— Sarah
Registered Veterinary Nurse, 15 years
Cape Town, South Africa
EDIT: Many people are messaging me and asking whether they can buy this on Amazon.
Do not do it.
Petra warned me about this. There are counterfeit products using the Vermipaws name and fake third-party test results.
The genuine product is only sold directly by Vermipaws.
The link is above.
If you see it on Amazon or at Absolute Pets, it is not made using the verified Carpathian raw material.
I learnt this lesson the expensive way with the first wormwood product I bought.
P.S. The Amazon wormwood drops I gave Bodhi for three weeks were tested at 0.14% thujone, six times weaker than the concentration required to pe*****te biofilm.
His symptoms became worse during those three weeks because the parasites continued multiplying.
After four weeks on Vermipaws, the scooting stopped completely.
After eight weeks, his blood tests were perfect.
Do not waste time using deworming products that cannot pe*****te the shield.
Your dog’s kidneys cannot wait.
P.P.S. Bear chewed his paws for three years before his kidneys failed.
The chewing was not “only allergies”.
It was the first warning sign that his gut was inflamed and his body was filtering toxins it could not eliminate.
I thought I had time.
I did not.
If your dog has chronic itching, scoots, suffers from ear infections or paces at 03:00 in the morning, start using Carpathian thujone today:
https://www.tankade.com/ver32-za/adv
