Health Concerns Commonly Found In Older Dogs: Part 3

Baldness: A chronic slow loss of hair, due to ill health, is sometimes found in older dogs. Feed a diet of raw foods: meats, vegetables, and fruits. Give brewers' yeast, kelp, and desiccated liver. Add raw corn, olive, peanut, or safflower oil to the food for unsaturated fatty acids. Chopped dandelion leaves (high in copper) may be added to the food. Balding areas can be bathed daily with an infusion of rosemary leaves, marigold flowers, or daffodil leaves. Castor and eucalyptus oil can also be massaged into the balding areas.

Breast Tumors: Often occur in unspayed female dogs. Tumors are very often caused by hormonal imbalances and changes, together with a general state of toxemia and ill health. The breast tumor can be linked with an estrogen factor. Tumors on any part of the body are the body's attempt to localize and isolate some disease condition. "Tumor" means swelling, and tumors are benign or malignant by classification. In reality, a tumor is often benign in certain of its areas and malignant in others. Biopsies can aggravate the malignant portion of tumors, sometimes causing their rapid spreading.

By cutting out the tumor or tumors, one is only removing the local indications of the disease. Nothing is being done about the cause. In many cases the cause has not even been sought for or recognized. Therapies that will decrease or dry up a tumor can also serve to prevent them. Nonorthodox treatments have been used to stop the spread, even though they did not significantly reduce the size of the tumor. It is the spread of a malignancy that kills, more often than the size of the tumor itself. Removing the toxic or poisonous quality is all-important in treating a tumor, malignant or otherwise. A diet rich in live, raw foods, will serve to supply vital enzymes to the body. Enzyme therapy may be indicated along with raw foods.

A theory on cancer that seems most valid among nutritional circles is that cancer is partly caused by faulty protein metabolization. By changing to a raw, live-food diet, you will give the blood a chance to clarify itself. A clean blood stream means a healthy body. A diseased, choked-up blood stream can breed nothing but disease. Herbal therapies include blue violet leaves, red clover, goldenseal, garlic, and turnip used both internally and as a poultice; goose grass as a poultice; burdock, dandelion root, slippery elm, comfrey, blue flag, and poke root as a poultice and as tea.