Flea allergy dermatitis, fortunately, is becoming a lesser concern for us because flea products nowadays are so good. When a flea bites, they inject a small amount of saliva with an anticoagulant. The anticoagulant keeps the blood from clotting so that the flea can take its blood meal. Some of the saliva stays behind, and many dogs are allergic to the saliva. So a flea bite causes a dog to itch and can cause him to itch for days or weeks. That's what flea allergy dermatitis is. It's actually not an allergy to fleas, but the flea saliva, and those dogs need flea control, and usually, something to help with inflammation. Who would have thought a flea has enough saliva to cause a problem in a larger animal?

Food allergy dermatitis is a little more specific. A dog who has food allergy dermatitis has skin problems due to the diet they're eating. When I talk to people about food allergies, it's not that their dog has a problem with Purina, Hills, Science Diet, or Blue. It is the allergen. It's beef, chicken, corn, wheat, soy, or something in the food they're having a problem with.

Many people want to change foods because they think their dog has a food allergy. Well, I'll be honest, most of the over-the-counter foods are very similar, and it's hard to diagnose food allergies that way. So we do this with what we call novel protein diets, alligator and green pea diets, kangaroo and potato, and duck is frequently used. It's allergen sources the dogs never had before, so they really can't be allergic to it. We also use hydrolyzed proteins, which is chicken, and your dog may be allergic to chicken, but they've broken the chicken into such small pieces, hydrolyzed the proteins so that the dog's body no longer understands it's eating chicken. So it can't be allergic to it. So there are special ways to go about that as we work through food allergy dermatitis.

Food allergy testing is really difficult because you have to feed that novel protein and nothing else because there are food allergy tests out there that are crappy tests. They're a waste of people's money. I don't do them. When we do food allergy testing, we're actually doing food allergy trials, which means we put the dog on one of these specific foods and nothing but that food for six weeks, no cheating. No McDonald's French fry, nothing from the table, and no dog treats. Nothing but this food for six weeks. And if they get better, they are food allergic. That's a tough test, though. Few can pass it, and it's not the dogs that determine that usually.

Dermatitis is a very broad, general term, and it just means inflammation of the skin. It can be caused by innumerable different things. It's just a general term. Really, it doesn't mean anything. If your dog has dermatitis, it just tells me it has a skin problem and very little after that.