Thread: Itchy & Scratchy

Originally Posted by Alice Kable

Have you had a food allergy test done? It is a blood test and the results will take the guess work out of picking a food. Ruggles is allergic to chicken, beef, pork, lamb, corn, potatoes and rice. That really limited his food choices. I feed him Nature's Variety Instinct Limited Ingredient Turkey.

I was looking at a website to a local dermatologist and this is what they said about testing for food allergies: An important point to understand is that neither blood testing nor intradermal skin testing are useful for identifying allergy to foods. Although some companies offer blood tests for food allergy, we cannot promote their use. For the same reason, we do not offer skin testing for food allergy. Instead, we use specialized hypoallergenic diet trials containing novel or hydrolyzed ingredients.

My vet has also said that you cannot detect food allergies through a blood test. This is discouraging to me but you said you have done it and it proved to be accurate.

Originally Posted by bullmama

Yes it seems that blood testing does provide false positives but it can really help give you a guideline.


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I'm hoping that this new food will work for him. Right now I am trying to get his itching under control and the vet's office has a medication for me to pick up which should help. If after 6-8 weeks this new food isn't working, I will take him to the dermatologist and have him tested for environmental allergies and maybe switch him to raw feeding.

@Chrugs, like Lisa said there can be false positves, but usually a false positive would have a low score and you can ignore it. Both Mack and Ruggles had a few 1s which we ignored, it's the 3s and up you need to eliminate. It helped us select food for both of them!

@Alice Kable so far the 2 dermatologists I have looked into won't even do a blood test for food allergies.