Amanda Robson
I agree entirely with you Hrlrnah - I too feel unalloyed fury at what big (p)harm(a), in cahoots with our veterinary practice here in the UK, has done to our beloved Labrador. She came to us in 2018, aged just 5 years, already having been for some years, on a daily dose of Apoquel for an alleged 'otherwise unmanageable' skin allergy. I took her in the fortnight after she'd come to us to our (then) trusted vet, who had looked after all our furry family members for the previous 20 years with thoughtfulness, kindness and a high standard of care (two Labradors and one cat had lived long, healthy and happy lives - 14, 15 and 20 years respectively, hence our trust in the veterinary practice) for some advice about whether to keep going with the Apoquel. He just asked me how many pills I'd like to take home - no suggestion of discussing the mechanism of action of this horrible, toxic drug, so I assumed that it was an antihistamine, although I did reduce her intake dramatically straight away, only giving her a half dose when she had a particularly itchy day in the spring/summer. I changed her food completely, cooked for her myself and gave her plenty of fresh fruit and veg (from our garden, so no chemicals), along with taking her sea swimming, exercising her in grassy pastures and woods - we live in the South Downs in England, so there's lots of open space and interconnecting footpaths (away from crops and glyphosate nasties) and making sure that her bedding (and our sofa covers) were washed regularly, using only non-bio, chemical-free products. Her itching went away completely and over the next year, I was able to take her off the Apoquel altogether.
Fast forward to autumn last year (2022) when our shiny, exuberant and perfectly healthy and super-fit 9 y.o girl suddenly fell over one morning, having lost all strength and tone in her left foreleg. We took her straight to the vet, who (of course) just prescribed an anti-inflam (Loxicom) and said it was probably an idiopathic something-or-other and to just wait and see. She was fine the next day and back to her energetic self, so we heaved a sigh of relief. She then developed a sudden limp on her back leg a month later, but didn't seem distressed or in pain from it, so we took her back to the vet after a week of no change or improvement in her gait/limp, who examined her (extremely roughly, which did make her sore) and said he though it was 'probably her anterior cruciate, which would necessitate a TPLO' to fix it. We were horrified at the idea of putting her through such a major surgery on such a flimsy basis, but having trusted this practice for 25 years, we booked her in for an x-ray in 10 days' time. The x-ray itself was inconclusive, but they obviously did something terrible to her during the procedure as she never 'came back' from that, but 2 days later went into shock with haemorrhagic diarrhoea and had to go back to the vet for 24 hour 'care' and IV fluids. We brought her home 3 days later (they were STILL planning to do a TPLO op on her, despite no further follow-up or tests to find out why she should have gone into shock, and were very blase about my frantic worries about the state she was in and the fact that she could barely move and barely eat). I phoned them daily, telling them about her lack of progress and fretting about her affected hind leg wasting away before our eyes. There was a strange smell coming from her leg by now - but they dismissed this and just prescribed more painkillers..... I knew intuitively by now that it wasn't her cruciate ligament that was the problem, but I couldn't get anybody at the veterinary practice to take my concerns seriously, so in despair and desperation, we took her in to see the independent osteo surgeon to see what he thought. She was shipped straight off to the operating room without being examined and 15 minutes later, he called us to say that her leg was 'red hot' and she had a raging temperature. They x-rayed her leg again and said it was an osteosarcoma and that she probably wouldn't survive amputation and chemo, which they said would only give her another '6 months at best', so the kindest thing for her would be for us to agree not to have her brought round from her anaesthetic, but have her euthanised there and then. We asked if we could be with her (we only live 10 mins away), but he said no, they needed to do it right away, so we lost our beautiful, beloved friend without even being able to comfort her at the end. I am in tears as I type this and can't read what I'm typing - even 8 months later, we are in such pain and I feel so desperately sad and guilty about trusting these venal, profit-driven shills for the pharmaceutical industry. I have failed my dearest friend utterly and I have nothing but regret about the path I took her down. The take-away lesson from this miserable tale is that even though she'd been off the Apoquel for more than 3 years and I had learned about its mechanism of harm - (thanks to the wicked shenanigans of the 'vaccine' barons with their inadequately-tested, dangerous mRNA gunk they were busily injecting into humans, I started hitting the books and doing my own homework), it was too late to rebuild her immune system and the annihilation of her cancer surveillance system let in a turbo-charged, deadly killer. Please don't imagine for a moment that the danger is past once you stop giving this dreadful drug to your dog; as they age, they become immunosenescent anyway, so to have already compromised her immune system to such a catastrophic degree by effectively downregulating it to the point of almost switching it off entirely whilst on Apoquel, is a crazily hazardous way to go. Our beloved dogs rely on our good judgement and wisdom for their wellbeing now that we can't rely on allopathic vets anymore (I do think they weren't as bad as they are now, before they lost their integrity via the profits-over-pets paradigm), so I would urge anybody reading this to follow Dr Falconer's advice and find an alternative/holistic vet and STOP the Apoquel (and most other allopathic prescriptions) immediately. At no point was our darling girl seen as anything other than 'a leg' or 'a gastroenteritis' case by any of the vets and no dots were ever joined or a more holistic approach taken. I should add that coincidentally, our old veterinary practice had been bought out by a private equity partnership in 2018, but that none of us (i.e. the clients/patients) had been told that the practice had changed hands, so had no idea that their approach might have changed. They mysteriously upped their vet numbers from 4 practising vets in 2018, to 24 by 2022, so that by the time our lovely girl was in their (extremely indifferent, unkind and careless 'care') last autumn, she was seen by no fewer than 11 different vets over the 10 days she had left to live. We are very very sad, bitter and traumatised - telling this tragic story won't bring her back, but it might just raise awareness and help a few other beloved dogs avoid a similar fate; I can only hope and pray. Our dogs deserve much much better.