Show HN: Adopted a dog, had no clue what meds she needed, did some research | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Adopted a dog, had no clue what meds she needed, did some research

dogmedicationdb.com

252 pointsyoungj73 comments

I just want to say that this is an beautiful example of the hacker ethos being put to use. The creator got into a new field, saw a hole in information, and put together a neat, useful resource. Just perfect.

Actually, I was having this exact same issue last week, as my dog was sick and I found myself scouring google for even a semi-organized resource. Excellent job!

I am going to save, but I think it still could use some medications to be complete. I think some commonly used "farm" medications, like the very effective de-wormer; panacur would be a good addition. For example, this drug can be given orally in food as a paste, tastes ok, is safe and will eradicate roundworms, hookworms, whipworms and certain tapeworms.

+1 I felt the exact same way! True hacker in heart.

I would recommend adding a warning for Hartz products - they are notoriously toxic and kill pets. http://www.hartzvictims.org/

Showed this to my wife, a veterinarian, that was her first comment - don't use Hartz, their products kill cats and dogs.

Her second comment was that the matrix seemed outdated, most meds were available in oral form now.

Last time I checked Costco's Kirkland brand flea and tick is also dangerous.

I don't want to be a downer, but I don't like this concept. I understand the desire to educate yourself about the medicine you need for your pet, but the best thing you can do is find a good vet that you trust to give you this advice. In fact the mechanism that you have where by you allow the user to buy said medication from Amazon makes it seem like your putting this list out as an alternative to proper medical care.

There is much more to taking care of a pet then reading the packages of some medication and then buying it from amazon.

This is terrible advice. Whether it's for your own heath or your pet's you should always educate yourself. Doctors/veterinarian are heavily influenced by drug/pet supply companies. From her first days veterinary school, my girlfriend was constantly lobbied and given perks and educational material from the industry. It's not that she's not a good vet, but the system is corrupt.

In the case of my grandfather, multiple times we caught the doctor prescribing expensive prescriptions when more effective generics were available. In the case of my dog, my local vet pushes for Purina pet food[1] and vaccines when my doc is regularly titered. She is oblivious or fails to acknowledge the risks of a Lyme Vaccine carries [2] and serious allergic reactions that her recommended flea control can cause.

The only way to guarantee the best health care for yourself and your pet, is to educate yourself.

[1] http://www.aplusflintriverranch.com/define-menufoods-petfood...

[2] http://www.alldogsgym.com/health-and-nutrition/articles/heal...

Education is of course always good. Just make sure that you're getting an education based on amassed scientific evidence, and not anecdotes, sampling bias, or low-quality studies in general.

The best combination is still a properly educated patient (or in this case, pet owner) and a good doctor/veterinarian.

I still remember my vet having recommended opening my cat up (at a cost of thousands), with big chance for dying, for a sickness the vet couldn't figure out that my cat recovered on her own after we decided to let her come home and die with us instead. The vet said it was urgent because she wouldn't eat but actually our cat just needed a bit more attention when being fed while sick. She recovered after I took a day off and fed her a biscuit by hand the whole day, every 5 or 10 minutes.

This is a single anecdote. This kind of thing happens with human doctors, lawyers, auto mechanics, and even engineers.

With incomplete information, you sometimes make an incorrect diagnosis. It doesn't reflect the overall value of the profession.

Your cat could just as easily have died, and from the experience of dating a vet for many years, I can tell you that they very often do.

I am not saying don't educate yourself. I am saying don't self medicate, which is what this site is encouraging ( wither it means to or not ).

For every story you have about a bad experience with a doctor or vet, any medical professional can recount to you hundreds of accounts of people who worsened their condition by either ignoring the advice of their "corrupt" doctor or by self medicating. Find yourself a good vet ( one who went to a good school and did an actual residency at a hospital ) and follow their advice.

Purina pet food is the highest quality, not crazy expensive pet food out there (but is owned by Nestle). Your source points out that many suppliers were impacted in 2007 - in fact all most all of the premium dog foods were impacted.

Is there an algorithm that would find the minimum subset of these to cover every parasite/bug?

It's the set cover problem: http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Set_cover_problem

Of course, but you can't just mix and match these medications. Some have serious side effects and can't be used repeatedly, and some have interactions with other meds.

You should just ask your vet. Vets will take into account the insects in your area, as well as your dog's coat and lifestyle.

You can do it manually in this case

Revolution + Sentinel Spectrum + (Flea4X or K9 Advantix II)

It'd be a really bad idea to just load your dogs up on meds. The risk of these parasites varies greatly by geographical region. For example, in the pacific northwest, there's no need to protect against heartworms.

Are you sure about this? My wife and I fostered a dog last year (here in Southern Oregon) that had heartworms. The treatment was nasty and dangerous to the dog, but the dog did recover.

Dogs won't contract heartworms naturally here but dogs brought in from other areas are definitely at risk of already having heartworms and possibly sharing those via feces. Basically an invasive species.

I Agree. All this things are changing. New vectors and new emergent diseases are not uncommon. An example is the new feline morbilivirus, very dangerous for cats and discovered in 2012. A local and experienced vet is in the best position to have trusty local info about diseases and parasites. Webs like this can not have this info, at least in its current state. Not a bad start, but can be improved a lot.

Is the med X legal in your country?, dunno, but you can order here your dog drugs. Can I mix X and Y?, dunno, order both and read the contraindications later. Are this meds dangerous for my other pets like my "always-chewing-dog-ears" cat, or my ferret? this web don't give you any clue. I know cases of kitten killed by the wrong treatment; Can you calculate the right doses for your big but starved and weak new rescued pet?... etc, etc...

Of course the owner can and should take some time to educate itself about recognising diseases (and much specially poisonings) of his pet, but good and comprehensive manuals are available in your book store, and of course to identify what kind of roundworm could or not have your dog is not trivial at all for a normal owner.

The guy that that puts all in his tank to cure "don't know what's this thing growing in my fishes" is sadly very common in aquariums. He/she kills currently much more aquarium fishes than the real diseases do.

>>Is there an algorithm that would find the minimum subset of these to cover every parasite/bug?

This is the same problem we have in embedded systems diagnostics. We used to make a list of failure modes, and then a list of diagnostic tests. A given test may detect multiple different failures and I've made grids exactly like this. I always advocate for finding the minimum set of tests to detect all failures (to minimize false positives and simplify software). I was going to make the same point in this case, but parent already did.

To be clear, sometimes it's sufficient to detect failure without knowing exactly what the problem was. For specific diagnostics you may want POST to handle that, but at runtime you may only need to detect that something has failed.

Awesome. Problem found, solution created. See, you don't need to create ridiculously overfunded ( - exuse my language -) bullshit products in order to "put a dent in the universe". Just try provide a solution to a real problem. Thumbs up!

This is really great, thank you for doing this.

Could you please add Advantix, Scalibor, Kiltix and Foresto for us Europeans :)

We use most of the others here also, but those I have listed above are used alongside the ones you have listed.

Trifexis is awesome and what I use for my active dog (and we have never had flea problems). The problem is that the pill smells very, very strongly of mold. I have to smash up the pill and mix it into peanut butter for my dog to even look at it. I also administer it outside and use gloves, because it will have your house smelling of mold for days. With a smaller dog (thus smaller dose/pill), you could force it down, but a 30+ lb dog will have too big of a pill and won't eat it normally for any reason.

Really? I have never noticed this. I just put it in a piece of cheese and they eat it right up. Maybe I have no sense of smell.

Does your dog throw up often when taking Trifexis? I was considering making the switch, but my parents dogs both have had a really hard time with it. Eventually they (my parents) gave up on Trifexis and went back to topical stuff because the vomiting was so bad.

To that end, I wouldn't mind maybe an accompanying table to the OP's medical list that maybe listed the negative side effects of some of these treatments. Might be a bit too much to ask though.

No, I haven't seen any vomiting. I was worried about that since I was breaking up the pill (and it smells awful) but my vet said it was fine since it is supposed to be chewable. I always serve it right after a full meal (usually the morning).

That's very surprising to hear. We have the 50+ lb dose, and I've never noticed a smell. My dog eats it like a treat without any coercion or disguising.

Wow, It's amazing how different my experience with trifexis is. My dog eats them like they are a treat(wags her tail, chews them completely, etc). I've never really noticed the mold smell.

A Veterinarian with reasonable prices is greatly valued. So valuable, with the right marketing I feel people would leave their estates to your business; I would. That's all I really have to say to Veterinarians, but I feel a lot of you need to ask for some businees advise. I see a lot of people skipping the trips to the vet because they just can't afford the high priced boutiqe veterinarian practice. I know people are inherintly cheep, but I think most just want to be treated fair. I also know what happens when vet hospitals offer too much for free. (SFSPCA offered a "no kill" policy. People started to abandon their animals, and ruined a great organization.) I will pass along-- I've always had big dogs. A Bullmastiff, and mixed breed American Bulldog/Pit. They look sturdy, but they are fragile. The purebred Bull Mastiff was always at the veterinarian. She had multiple problems from huge paws that attracted Foxtails/grass seeds to Entropian. I had a great income so going to the vet was no problem. I now have a low income and thank goodness for the mixed breeds. They are still fragile, but don't need to go to the vet as often. I still hear vets telling big breed dog owners about the benefits of exercise. Yes, exercise the dog, but let them choose when and where. All my dogs were over 100lbs, and when I exercized them too much their bodies fell apart. For the Bull Mastiff, a walk around a small lake was too much on a summer day with a gallon of water. She just dropped half way around. I sat with her until dusk, and then we just made it back to the car. My point is they, especially the Bulldog breeds are fragile.

The NRDC has a listing of various products and safety concerns at:

http://www.simplesteps.org/greenpaws-products

I'm using NexGard(not listed - just approved in 2014) and seems to be working fine so far - but since its new there isn't much data on it. I preferred the oral over a topical so I didn't have to worry about topical applications transferring to the home, others, clothing etc.

Heardgard and Frontline are usually all that anyone needs.

Interesting to read this thread to see that lots of people have to medicate their dogs. Is this a regional thing? I've had my dog 8 years and apart from the required injections it has never needed any medication.

In the US, yes. My dog gets two medical treats every month: one to prevent heart worms and one to keep ticks and fleas away.

Interesting. Is this something most dog owners you know do? Like I said it isn't the case for me and I'm not aware of any of my friends medicating their dogs unless they've had a procedure at the vet or something serious happen that required a vet.

Nice! It'd be helpful if one could check the column headers for the things you need to treat, and then the list is filtered for what is effective against those :)

If the place you adopted the dog from didn't give you information, you should talk to a vet about what parasites are common in your region and what treatment options there are. --Many times vets will offer a couple of options for non-prescription treatment and prevention.

If you're in a region that doesn't have fleas and ticks, there's no reason to treat your dog for them. The same goes for many of the other parasites listed.

Very cool. Nerd question -- can you talk a bit about how you made it? Tech stack used, etc.? Always curious about that stuff, especially when on Show HN.

Nice site. Interesting to see the information clearly laid out like that. This should exist for everything as a decision making tool.

It's not an either-or. We have a vet, but we still do our research on everything they recommend to understand the decisions that are being made. It all works very well for us. We're informed, but we also have a trusted adviser.

We just asked our vet.

Good first step, but you should research on your own. Vets can get kickbacks for pushing one and/or may not be up to date on all the latest studies and products.

You'd be surprised how bad vets (and doctors) can be with drugs. (Wife a pharmd.. and they drive her nuts)

Always value their professional opinion and experience, but never treat it as law

Interesting that nothing protects from everything. Is that just not possible or is that on purpose?

My first idea was that some of the pesticides in different medications might block or interact with each other, which is the reason why you usually get conditioner and shampoo in two bottles (the chemicals in most conditioners are cationic while the ones in shampoos are anionic)

Having now looked through quite a few Wikipedia articles of the pesticides used, I can't find no such statements... Except that I learned that some of these have a vague link to CCD.

Another thing is that the application time-scale and use-cases between these drugs differs - some you give every 6 months or so as prophylaxis, some you only give when there's an actual infection.

Not sure but some medication will interact negatively with others. Vets will usually tell you to give the heartworms medicine one day, and the flea one the next day, but not both at the same time.

You don't need to protect from everything. Several of these issues are so rare that you're better off treating them than preventing them and your dog suffering side effects.

You should really just talk to your vet. There's way more to it than a simple chart. They know the pharmacology, effectiveness, and necessity of all these drugs.

My girlfriend is a vet, and our dogs only take Trifexis. It works for our animals, their lifestyles, and our part of the country. Her prescription might change for an animal with short fur that goes hunting a lot. It all just depends.

In addition to not needing coverage for everything, some of the treatments require prescriptions because they can be dangerous to the pup. An example is preventative heartworm medication can be devastating to a dog with heartworms. A blood test is done to make sure a dog is heartworm negative.

Would be really awesome if there was some way to provide feedback on the effectiveness. My experience with cat medicine showed that what it says on the package is not to be trusted (for example all the "natural" stuff against fleas was completely useless)

Some of the "natural" stuff is also extremely dangerous.

Neem oil, for example, can kill your pet. You should never use neem oil anywhere near an animal.

In your research, did you explore other common immunizations like bordetella, parvo, rabies? (I realize these wouldn't fit into any overlapping things like you have here, I'm just curious if you might add it at some point.)

The main question is: In what area/country are the parasites resistant against those toxins. e.g. in Bremen neither advantage nor frontline works against fleas.

And I'm missing ARDAP by Shell in this list.

Awesome idea! Just a suggestion to the developer (if reading this), would be good to also have a list of what is okay to use on what breed/group (such as advocate for pastoral breeds).

While this is a good list, these medications are kind of snake oily.

I've had 5 dogs in my lifetime that have lived to age 15+. All I do is take them to the vet yearly and feed them good quality dry dog food.

I have lived in rural Arkansas to the east bay California, as far as exposure to various things. I've had a half wolf dog in AR that would routinely kill and eat armadillos, opossums, terapins, and all kinds of small wildlife. He was probably exposed to all kinds of nasty things.

Never did I give him any of these dog preventative medications that seems to be so popular today.

I have fostered multiple dogs afflicted with heartworm and it's terrible to keep an active animal still for months to prevent them from having a pulmonary embolism. It's widespread, difficult to cure, and otherwise fatal.

You don't note if your dog was an indoor dog, but on that front, some of us do not like to have fleas and ticks in our houses.

edit: also, if you have dog and cats, you really need to have your animals on heartworm prevention. Heartworms are much more dangerous to cats than dogs.

+1 - I have also fostered a dog being treated for heartworm, and it's not easy, plus dangerous to the dog. Prevention is really important.

I've had 5 dogs in my lifetime that have lived to age 15+. All I do is take them to the vet yearly and feed them good quality dry dog food.

Anecdotal evidence should not determine whether to treat your dog (or any species) with medicine – particularly with a sample size of 5.

these medicines aren't preventative, they're also used to cure existing infections. although they gave him all the serious shots, my dog still came home from the shelter with tapeworm and fleas. the grain-free organic-chicken based dog food i feed him isn't going to help with that. neither is letting him out into a field to kill some furry things (and believe me he loves to do that, he's a terrier).

also, dogs don't usually get worms and fleas from killing small animals, they get them from other dogs. just like people, if you live in the city (with dog daycare, dog parks, lots of other dogs playing on walks) it's a bigger problem than if you live in the suburbs or countryside and you have a mini-pack of your own dogs on your home property.

also, nobody ever said fleas or worms will kill your dog, it just makes life absolutely miserable for both the dog and the owner.

Yeah, have to echo some of the comments here. These medications are not 'snake oily,' so I don't know if you just intended to use a different phrase. These medications are actual pharmaceuticals and some of them based on human formulations (notably, the anti-worm medications). In the third-world, parasites are the leading cause of death in humans and even in the first-world there are people that get some of these parasitic worms. It's easy to dismiss their necessity when you haven't been affected by the disorder.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias

Edit: To clarify my personal recommendations as a dog owner, I use heartworm prevention and flea prevention as well as recommended vaccines. I don't use the other meds unless the fecal sample comes back positive for parasites; something that should be tested at a yearly vet visit.

My experience is different. My dogs (in southern CA) have been miserable in summer when they get fleas. Compulsive licking and scratching, sudden motions at all times of the day or night when they are trying to get to a crawling bug, etc.

Give him/her some Advantage, and that all goes away in a day or two. Amazing difference.

And I've had three cats in my life all of which have never been outside. They all still have managed to get fleas multiple times. (The fleas come in the house on your clothes and stuff)

The other thing is I'm not sure you know what snake oil is... all these medicines have real science behind them.

You misunderstand both the meaning of the word "snake oil" as well as the concept of science.

Do you have a template of this. I can think of 20 other areas where something like this would be useful. Nice work.

Why not do something like that for humans?

Physicians use this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Sanford-Guide-Antimicrobial-Therapy-Gu...

It has huge spreadsheets of antibiotics based on organism, resistance, etc. But there are a LOT of nuances to choosing the right medication.

this is cool. i adopted a shelter mutt about 2 years ago and i love him to death.

comment/feedback on the table: make the headers float with scroll, so that when you get to the bottom of the table, you can still see what the columns are.

I started clicking randomly, expecting it to change the Xs into Vs and vice-versa.

Pretty neat! Care to share with us what type of tech you used in the backend?

That dog will be alright. Great job you did there on the website.

Would you do this to your child ? See a vet.

Don't be silly. A dog is not comparable to a person.

I like my dog more than I like other people's children. There's a comparison for you!

A dog is comparable to a human in many ways.

For example, there are studies showing that many dog owners react to the loss of a pet as strongly as they do to the loss of a human family member.

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