If you’ve noticed that your dog’s coat has patches of inflammation, and that your dog can’t stop worrying its paws, chewing and licking, you may have a bad case of atopy in your dog to deal with. One of the first things you should rule out when you see your dog constantly worrying its coat is flea allergy dermatitis, of course. But once you have ruled that out as a possible cause of why your dog keeps scratching itself, you could conceivably begin to think of dog allergies that come from mold, pollen or even dust inhalation. Your first recourse here is probably be in a tar shampoo or a topical ointment. That should take care of the inflammation. Your next concern of course is doing something about the itching that leads to all the scratching. There are shampoos available that soothe the skin enough to help your dog stop scratching and start the healing process.

If all of this does nothing and the dog allergies seem to continue, your vet will begin the process of allergy testing, an involved and lengthy process that will involve all kinds of tests that try to zero in on the source of your dog’s problems. Your doctor will probably first start out with the ELISA blood tests to look for antibodies in the blood that are a sure sign of an allergic reaction. It is also quite common to use a RAST blood test a similar reason. The blood test looks for all kinds of allergens, things in your dog’s environment that might get an adverse reaction going – dust, mold, pollen, just about anything that is known to set dog allergies off. Of course, these are tests that were originally developed to help humans. How effective they will be working on dogs depends on luck usually.

Your doctor can also go with a more accurate test  – something you’ve seen used in humans to. It’s called intradermal skin test. The vet shaves off a tiny area of your dog’s coat and injects a tiny quantity of some suspected allergen under the skin. If the skin right there starts to react pretty soon, the vet knows what the cause of the dog’s problems is. Doctors usually zero in on the allergy that has the blame more times than not with this kind of testing. Once the dog’s allergies have been identified, it can be a pretty straightforward path from that point on forward. You just make sure that your dog doesn’t come by any of the suspected allergens in the course of its day, and your dog should be fine.