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A while back, I met a woman on the beach who clued me in to the presence of foxes there—they had managed to survive in spite of a massive assault on their forest habitat by the construction industry. She was able to solve the mystery of the stinky stuff in the sand that Sunny kept rolling in: fox urine! (And just a few days ago, I finally saw one of those gorgeous creatures in the moonlight for about five seconds.)
Anyway, I digress. I ran into the same woman again last weekend, but this time she was near tears as she told me that her Springer spaniel had just been diagnosed with congestive heart failure and only had a few months to live. My ears perked up because that rang a bell for me big-time.
In the early '90s, I was doing some research on that very topic, and I picked up some useful, even life-saving information that, unfortunately, your average vet will not share with you. However, I was lucky enough to meet the late veterinary cardiologist Eugene Musselman, who confirmed all the information that I had learned on this topic.
When dogs get dilated cardiomyopathy (DCM), their heart muscle becomes weak and flabby and can no longer pump blood at a sufficient rate. The onset of this disease can be quite sudden. Some dogs even die of it before showing any noticeable symptoms. Sometimes you do get a little bit of warning in the form of a cough, exercise intolerance, and listlessness, but you have very little time to intervene if the disease has already progressed that far. Luckily, only a small number of dogs (about 2 percent) get this disease—mostly cocker spaniels, Springer spaniels, Dobermans, boxers, large-breed dogs such as Great Danes, and a few others. But if your dog gets it, it will break your heart because it's so unexpected and primarily affects middle-aged dogs or even younger.
The good news is that dogs with DCM are usually deficient in L-carnitine and taurine and can benefit enormously from supplementation with these amino acids. These amino acids can be given preventively, just to be on the safe side (500 mg L-carnitine and 250 mg taurine per day for a 50-lb. dog), but once your dog has DCM, the dosage is much higher and can be expensive: 1 gram of L-carnitine per 10 lbs. of bodyweight per day and 500 mg of taurine per 10 lbs. of bodyweight per day (both divided into a morning and evening dose). The cheapest is to buy it in loose-powder form online. The point is to flood the blood plasma with these amino acids in an effort to push more of them into the heart muscle, since the deficiency seems to stem from an inability to transport the amino acids from the blood into the heart muscle tissue.
While I was doing this research, the middle-aged Springer spaniel of some friends of mine, Tiffany, got the dreaded diagnosis of DCM. She was given less than a year to live. My friends had already endured the sudden death of their large white German shepherd from the same illness. So to avoid additional tragedy, I advised them to give Tiffany 5 grams of L-carnitine and 2.5 grams of taurine per day. Well, the effect was astonishing. Within 24 hours, she was outside chasing squirrels again! And she went on to live for four more active years.
For even better results, I recommend adding coenzyme Q10 and the herb hawthorne to the regimen. Coenzyme Q10 is extremely beneficial to both the heart and the liver (as well as the gums). In fact, a friend of my parents was diagnosed with DCM years ago, and he cured it primarily with coenzyme Q10. And I heard that a similar story aired on Dateline once, but I can't claim to have seen it. Hawthorne has been a folk-medicine heart tonic for ages. Expert ethnobotanist James Duke strongly recommends it too.
So I conveyed all this information to my beach friend and her husband, and they attempted to memorize it all since none of us had any paper to write on. As we parted, she hugged me and said, "I was praying for a miracle, and I got one!" I fully expect her Springer spaniel to be bounding through the waves for years to come.
