Articles
Dr. Demian Dressler has been writing articles for DogCancerBlog.com since 2008. If you’re looking for excellent advice and insight into your dog’s cancer, this site has hundreds of articles to use. You can search using the box above or choose a topic from the navigation menu. And you can always ask us for help!
Critical Question when Weighing Dog Cancer Chemotherapy Options
Many Guardians are faced with difficult decisions when facing a dog cancer diagnosis. One of the toughest is whether to choose a treatment that seems more aggressive than others. A guardian should first get an idea of whether the expectation of the treatment is worse than the treatment. Many times dogs receiving chemotherapy treatment do…
Read ArticleChubby Golden Retriever Has Less Cancer Protection
I was talking to one of my clients today in the exam room. She owns an awesome Golden Retriever named Baloo. Like his namesake in the movie “The Jungle Book,” Baloo is happy, friendly, goofy and….chubby. I started telling Baloo’s owner about the cancer rate in the breed. It is estimated that around 2/3…
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Acupuncture and Acupressure
Can acupuncture be useful for dogs with cancer? Yes, it can. Here are some articles and publications that support this ancient technique.
Read ArticleWhat is a scar revision?
When a veterinarian or oncologist diagnoses canine cancer, often a surgery is done to remove the cancer cells. Surgery remains one of the cornerstones of cancer treatment in dogs. With surgery, if all things go very well, your veterinary surgeon may be able to completely remove the cancer. This may mean a cure is reached,…
Read ArticleMelanoma Vaccine for Amelanotic Melanoma?
An interesting question came up recently. A guardian has a dog who is afflicted with amelanotic melanoma. This is a special kind of cancer. Normally, melanomas have pigment in them, and thus they are dark. However, there is a more rare and odd kind of this cancer that lacks the pigment. Melanomas can occur in…
Read ArticleHow Was This Not Found Earlier?
For Helen, Hunter, Guardians coping with dog cancer, and their dogs. Cancer seems to sneak up on us often. Many times, Guardians will wonder how it is possible that such a horrible disease could have been brewing while the dog was acting completely normal. And, how is it possible that the vet missed it during…
Read ArticleA Big Picture Viewpoint
The recent earthquakes and tsunamis in Japan can teach us a lot. I live on Maui. We had a little tsunami damage here from the same quake that has created the horror show in Japan. Now we face the potential of radiation exposure, depending on how the nuclear leak turns out. This is nothing compared…
Read ArticleKidney Supplements For Dog Cancer
Cancer of the kidneys can be very hard, both for you and for your dog. This is actually a rare cancer, so I hope some information here can help. Let’s look at this topic. To understand what happens with cancers of the dog kidney, it is important to understand what the kidneys normally do. Just…
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Grief: Not A Four Letter Word
Let’s face it. In the world of dog cancer, grief is part of the deal. But, the truth is that it is often ignored. Honestly, when many of us hear the word “grief”, we kind of turn away and try not to think about it. “Let’s deal with this.” “Let’s get the job done.” “How…
Read ArticleHow Do I know The Right Course of Treatment, part 2
In the last post we looked at the information you need to gather about surgery, chemotherapy and radiation for your dog when deciding on a treatment plan. But as you know, the choices do not stop there. As a Guardian you also need to decide what to do. Since you are your dog’s primary advocate,…
Read ArticleHow Do I know The Right Course of Treatment
The decisions surrounding dog cancer treatment can be complicated. This is not only because of the treatments themselves. Surgery, chemotherapy and radiation have multiple steps. Diet and supplements are not necessarily strait forward either. Steps to change a dog’s brain chemistry to a cancer fighting state take some doing as well. Boosting life quality needs…
Read ArticleTime and the Joys of Life in Dog Cancer
We are very busy in modern life. It seems as time goes on, the faster it speeds by. Dog cancer is connected in many ways to time. There is the question that is most pressing: “How much more time do I have?”. This is an important piece of information to get, along with the odds…
Read ArticleA Silver Lining in Dog Cancer
This is a blog about dog cancer. As such, you are probably here looking for some advice. Something useful to help this dire predicament you are in with your loved dog. Most often I will write about some outside the box approach to treating your dog’s disease. Maybe a new therapy that is coming up,…
Read ArticleBut Will Palladia Work?
I recently received a question about whether the chemotherapy drug Palladia would work for a dog with cancer. This guardian wrote that her dog was breathing hard, all night, and that X-rays showed the cancer had spread to the lungs. She was asking as to whether the drug Palladia would work for her dog. In…
Read ArticleChemosensitizers
We need longer life expectancies in dogs with cancer. When guardians hear the statistics about dog cancer survival, they are often shocked at how grim things sound. And to be honest, they are grim. For this reason, we need to start looking “outside the box” of existing conventional cancer care. This was one of the…
Read ArticleAn Overview of What Else Can I Do?
The most common question I receive is: My dog has cancer. What else can I do? Well, this is a very short question that needs a very long answer. I will do my best to give the big categories here. First, get the data you need. A real guardian needs information to make aware decisions. …
Read ArticleWhy Rescue Chemotherapy Is Not As Good
Cancer cells are really quite amazing, but not in a good way. They have these little pumps in their outer wall (the cell membrane). They go by a couple of different names, but the easiest one to remember is MDR. MDR stands for Multi-Drug Resistance. The reason these pumps are so amazingly bad is that…
Read ArticleExciting News for Apocaps
When a new approach to medical issues is found, many steps must be completed before it can be officially used for any medical problem. To bring a new contenter all the way to FDA approval, it is estimated that it takes about 15 years and (as a very low estimate) about 50 million dollars. This…
Read ArticleSurgery and “Blood Thinning” Drugs and Supplements
The approach in The Dog Cancer Survival Guide, as well as my own personal philosophy concerning problem-solving, is to use what works, regardless of the packaging material. In other words, it makes no difference if the recommendation comes from a conventional (allopathic) vet, or an “alternative” vet, as long as it works, is safe and…
Read ArticleNew Technologies for Brain Cancer Coming Up
Brain cancer, both in pets and in people, is very difficult to deal with. First, we have something called the blood-brain barrier. This is not really a wall per se, but is rather just a feature of the tiny blood vessels in the brain. These little capillaries have tight junctions that don’t let things pass…
Read ArticleTo Chemo or Not To Chemo?
One of the little known facts about veterinary medicine is that chemotherapy does not cure cancer in dogs, with few exceptions (except transmissible venereal tumor or the very rare lympho or something). I believe that many people are unaware of this fact. So we are left with a treatment modality that has a goal of…
Read ArticleFight Cancer With Local Chemotherapy
Many dog lovers hear grim survival statistics after receiving a dog cancer diagnosis, and it is extremely overwhelming. So much so that they go on a search for new and innovative ways to get better odds, longer survival times, and better life quality. Well, the same thing happened to me! Why settle for stats that…
Read ArticleA Dog With Bone Cancer
I couple of months back, I diagnosed a bone tumor in a wonderful dog named Dolly. Dolly is one of the world’s happiest dogs. She is an elderly family member (she would not be happy if I told you her age). She is a Boxer. As many are aware, Boxers are one of the breeds…
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