CIMDA

Catherine - thank you so much for the reply and suggestions.

Jo - Those were extremely helpful links, I have an appointment to discuss with our vet today.

I'll follow up here with our approach and results to hopefully help others in the same boat with their pups.

Thanks again, I'm relieved to have found folks that can provide some insight here. I'll follow up with our approach and results to hopefully help someone else out in the future.

Hi everyone, I'm very happy to have come across this forum, you seem to be a very helpful bunch!

My wife and I have a 2.5 year old male vizsla Calhoun, and I'm hoping that perhaps someone here can offer me some advice. Calhoun periodically has, since he was around a year old, had bumps/hive looking patches on his back that turn to dry flakey looking spots with associated hair loss. Sometimes it skips the bump phase and sort of moves directly to hair loss patches. Occasionally, and more recently, he's gotten these small patches on his head as well along with puffy red eyes. He's been to the vet many times as a result.

We, along with our vet, pretty much came to the conclusion this was all caused by environmental allergies, but no treatments really ever seem to do much to make them go away, they seem to come and go on their own. I had thought the pattern was seasonal, but this fall and winter here in Rhode Island (we're in the US), they've really hung around. Our vet has prescribed antibiotics, prednisone, apoquel, over the counter allergy meds like Benadryl and Zyrtec, along with medicated shampoo. Sometimes he's itchy, though mostly he's not really...when he is the apoquel seems to help. I've pretty much stopped with the meds at this point and stuck with regular bathing as I never saw a notable difference in anything with the meds.

I've wanted to find a good holistic vet or attempt a holistic approach to managing his skin condition, but haven't had any luck finding a reputable holistic vet in our area or a good source of information on what is causing Cal's issue. Our vet is really wonderful otherwise, I just think they haven't seen this sort of condition before. I've included photos taken today of Cal's back in direct sunlight so that you can see what we're looking at.

I've googled Cal's condition ad nauseam, looking for help, and finally came across http://www.vizslahealth.net/sebacious-adenitis/ last night, which links to this forum and really opened my eyes to the possibility of Cal having sebaceous adenitis. The early picture of Tucker looks just like Cal's back. I still don't know if what I'm looking at is sebaceous adenitis or skin allergies, but I'm open to and very appreciative of any insight you all can provide.

Pictures of Cal's back below along with one of him looking happy and handsome for good measure.

Thanks for reading!

Ben