BigPharma Lies

What Dermatologists & Veterinarians Don’t Know

And how it affects every one of us and our pets.

I thought I was as fed up with BigPharma as I could possibly be, and then this happened—a recent visit to my dermatologist to help with an itchy scalp that was driving me completely nuts.

According to Wikipedia, a dermatologist is a specialist medical doctor who manages diseases related to skin, hair, nails, and some cosmetic problems. We need these guys to check our moles, nuke our keratoses (actinic or otherwise), and otherwise help us deal with skin that is often the first sign that we’re getting older fast.

It sags, it flakes, it dries out, it wrinkles—all signs that the clock is ticking, but otherwise hardly more than an ugly nuisance for most of us. There are some serious issues with aging skin too, but today I’m just going to talk about one simple thing that dermatologists, and their veterinary counterparts, get completely wrong.

It’s not their fault. Here’s how I learned that, the hard way, and who’s really to blame here.

My Yorkie’s Name Was Shenanigan

When I returned to the US from a two-year gig in London back in the ’70s, I brought with me five delightful Yorkshire Terriers, breeding stock for my line of show dogs, but mostly to be my little fuzzy love-kids.

The transfer from the UK to the panhandle of Florida was more traumatic than I could have imagined, environmentally speaking. My Skids (little furkids who couldn’t get traction on wood floors) had never been exposed to fleas, ticks, mosquitoes, and an unimaginable flurry of pollens and other potential allergens. No one warned me about this!

Within a month, I was at the vet, desperately seeking solutions to make them stop itching and scratching.

My vet prescribed steroids (prednisone), initially by pill and ultimately by injection. Shenanigan had the worst time of it. When I first took her to the vet, she had a beautiful long coat of shiny, silky hair, but she was scratching so much that she was tearing her hair out by the roots.

Within a few weeks of steroid treatments, Shenanigan lost all her hair (a condition called alopecia, which means “balding for unknown reasons”) and her skin turned black. She started to stink. And I mean stinking out loud.

Isn’t it fun to know a little Latin and Greek? So when you go to the doc and say “I have a bald spot on the back of my head,” they translate it for you—”alopecia.” Big help. Or, “Doc, my ears are ringing.” “Well, you have tinnitus,” which means ‘ringing in the ears.’ Or, “Doc, I have a circle of red, itchy bumps,” to which she replies, “Oh, you have annularis granuloma,” which means ‘bumps in a circle.’ Why do they do that?

As was commonly accepted practice then (and still is today), steroids are prescribed to stop the itch response and the associated inflammation. Sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t.

But what corticosteroids also do, that nobody wants to talk about, is suppress the body’s immune system.

So, whatever was bugging my poor dog just got all her natural defenses squashed by prednisone and went into a full-on nuclear war with her skin.

Here’s what was actually happening to Shenanigan that her veterinarian didn’t understand. Again, it wasn’t his fault, but I’ll get to that later.

Shenanigan had a yeast infection

All of us animals who have skin and hair/fur have active colonies all over us, since shortly after birth, of a variety of microbes, including bacteria and fungi. Under normal conditions, when our skin environment is balanced and healthy, all these guys get along just fine and do their jobs without us being aware of them at all.

But when something goes out of whack, like when steroids are invoked, the body’s immune system crashes, and little beasties (Malassezia yeast, a type of fungus) that live in and around the hair follicles, go ballistic, unchecked and partying heartily.

Yeast is a common type of fungus, and it’s everywhere on our bodies. There’s an excellent TED Talk that explains its vital role in our well-being and how it can go wrong. This talk popped up in my news feed this morning and prompted me to write this essay. It’s well worth watching.

Back to Shenanigan: When a flea bites a dog, the opened skin allows surface microbes to enter and potentially infect. The body’s immune system responds with histamines and other defenses, and an alert signal (the “itch”) is sent. If the infection overpowers the defenses, things get serious fast. This is why Shenanigan was itching so ferociously. Her little English body just wasn’t prepared for Florida critters and climate.

But then, after the vet gave her steroids, what was left of her natural immunity was wiped out, and the yeast infection went non-linear.

Three months later, the vet told me he was going to have to put her hairless, black-skinned, unbearably inflamed and itchy little body down. “There is no hope, there’s nothing more I can do,” he said.

I saved Shenanigan’s life by ignoring the vet.

Back in merry old England, dog lovers knew what to do for itchiness. While probably not aware of malassezia itself, they knew that a mixture of yellow sulfur and motor oil slathered on the itchy places would fix the problem every time.

In tears, I fled the vet’s office and headed directly to the pharmacy to purchase sulfur florets to prepare a remedy I had learned about from fellow dog show exhibitors in the UK. Back home, I made a greasy paste of sulfur and vegetable oil and slathered her whole body with the goopy mess, and set up a little temporary cozy spot for her in the garage.

Her itching stopped instantly. Within two days, she had whiskers sprouting all over her body. Within six months, her long silky coat had grown back in full. Within one year, she was back in the show ring completing her AKC championship.

When I told the vet about this later, all he could think to say was, “Well, I guess the steroids worked after all.” A lesser person would have probably throttled him on the spot.

What does all this have to do with BigPharma?

The sulfur/oil mixture worked so well with Shenanigan’s problem that I kept a jar on hand for any little itch or bump or bite on any of my dogs. And then I went to graduate school and learned a few more things about chemistry.

Fast-forwarding a couple of decades, after working up formulations in my kitchen until I hit on a consumer-friendly recipe that worked, I found a manufacturer to make the stuff and started my business selling products to treat dogs, cats, horses, and sometimes people. (Message me if you wish to know more. I sold the business a few years ago, and it has grown considerably since then, having “cured” thousands of animals from yeast infections in the skin.)

Because of the prevalence of unsuccessful prednisone treatments for skin disorders, I took my show on the road, teaching dog groomers, pet supply store owners, and pet product manufacturers about yeast, sulfur, and steroids. Sales soared. Pet parents wrote heartfelt letters of gratitude for the saved lives of their pets.

And then I hit a roadblock: I wanted to teach students in veterinary programs about yeast infections and how to manage them. There are only about 32 (at last count) veterinary colleges in the USA, and I wanted to visit each one and give a lecture in the dermatology class specifically about malassezia, how to recognize and treat it without steroids.

That’s when I learned a very hard lesson: BigPharma supplies textbooks, controls the curriculum, lectures vet students on ways to use their proprietary products, and will even exclude lecturers who are not “on the team.” Although this may be shifting slightly in more recent years, back when I was trying to get the word out, BigPharma told the department chair of a university I wanted to visit that they would cut off funding if I were allowed on campus!!!

Local veterinarians I talked to about this told me that their drug sales reps threatened to stop selling steroids to them if they allowed my products to be sold in their clinics.

I was sued by a veterinarian because I told one of her customers that prednisone would make her pet’s situation worse (which it would have done). Fortunately, I was able to settle by acting contrite and begging forgiveness. In all 50 states, there is a law against contradicting the advice of a veterinarian (without a license).

Dermatologists are in the same boat with BigPharma and veterinarians.

I’m not saying that dermatologists tend to ignore or brush off complaints from older people. Or am I?

• “Celebrate those spots! You’ve lived long enough to have so many of them!”
• “Itchy scalp? Try this steroid shampoo, or these steroid drops, or this steroid ointment.”
• “You have too many lesions on your scalp, and even if I take my precious valuable time to freeze them they’ll just come back.”

And so on. You already know the drill. Avoid getting rid of those spots in favor of a lifetime of steroid applications, which make it worse, which sells more steroid potions.

For me personally? I was suffering with an extremely itchy, flaky rash that was spreading all over my scalp. My doc prescribed a corticosteroid preparation, which did absolutely nothing except make my hair greasy-looking.

With a sense of dejá vu all over again, I finally reached for an old container of my sulfur preparation and treated myself to a scalp massage with it, three days in a row.

Voilá! Gone. Cured. Done.

My dermatologist said, “Gee, I guess the steroids finally kicked in.”

Thanks for reading. This isn’t just a simple rant. It’s a wake-up call for all of us to start paying more attention to the insidious ways that BigPharma controls our entire medical system. This is just one small (but hardly insignificant) example. We can’t blame our medical people because they are just doing what they were taught, which segues into doing what they are told once they’re established in a medical practice.

Bottom line: A steroid preparation for scalp itchiness costs more than $50 (and isn’t covered by insurance). A remedy that actually works and can be prepared at home without a chemistry set costs about 25¢.

Pause for a moment and think about what’s really going on here.

PS: I am no longer affiliated in any way with the company I founded and ran for 15 years. But if you’d like to know more about them, message me. Thanks.

— Adelia E. Ritchie, PhD

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