Contact allergies refer to the primary allergies that dogs have when they're walking around or laying down in your house. Some dogs are allergic to house dust mites, and they're everywhere. No matter how clean your home is, you have house dust mites. And you probably have some mold there too. So the dog is exposed to them on their skin, and the antigens of these substances penetrate through the skin, and the dog's body creates what is essentially an over-response. And that's going to cause the histamine release, which causes the itching and discomfort for your dog.

The most common symptom in dogs is chewing on their feet, scratching at their bodies or their ears, shaking their heads, licking their rear ends, and just being miserable and unable to settle. You'll often find that they're licking their feet and scratching through the night, which means something's not right.

Unfortunately, allergies are relatively common. I would say probably up to 30 or 40% of all dogs have some form of allergies. Some are super mild. We see them on occasion. And other dogs live with them all year round. And those are the dogs we want to spend a lot of time with, making sure we're treating them with the best possible medications and topical therapies we can.

When you come to The Drake Center to see me and your dog is itchy and red and kind of miserable, I'm going to start to have an idea that your dog may have allergies. But I'm going to begin to rule out other things first, including external parasites. Sometimes there may be a food component, depending on where they're showing me symptoms. We tend to see food allergies in the ears and on the back end. A flea allergy is there too. When dogs are chewing on their feet, they may have a combination of contact allergies and a yeast infection. So there are many things that we're going to do. But I always say it takes a process of you understanding what it is that we're doing to get a determination of what's going on. And you also need the patience to see how your pet is going to respond because every dog responds a bit differently.

With a physical exam. It’s what we do, all day, every day. When you see dogs for a living, you get very used to seeing what normal is. You can read body language. You can read the posture of the tail, the posture of the dog. How are they standing? How are they moving? What's their facial expression? Are their ears up and perky? It starts with a basic observation and then when you put your hands on them. Again, pain is such a vague word. The pain of what? If they come in three-legged, well hello, that's where the problem is, so we're going to start on that leg. But if they come in just kind of not moving right and a bit sore, we have to start looking. You can check the range of motion. You can check the neck, the spine, the hip, etc., as It's what we we’re trained to do.

And in some cases we’ll need an x-ray to tell you, "Oh, that spot equals pain." But sometimes, you can see lesions on an x-ray to where you know that's a painful process that's going on. Sometimes we might need additional tests beyond just a physical exam. But I would say about pain, 90% of it is probably recognition and a hands-on physical exam.