Dorwest Milk Thistle Tablets

This depends on the severity of your pet's kidney disease. Any change to the diet can affect any special diet your dog is on for their kidneys. The amount you give of the Milk Thistle Tablets will be so small compared to the overall diet that this should not make a difference. However I suggest running the use of it past your vet to be certain.

I jave contacted the manufacturer who have advised the following:

This product isn’t made for rabbits. It is only licensed for dogs
and cats so we are unsure whether this product would be suitable for a
rabbit’s digestive
system, and if they would be able to break down the ingredients properly.
Rabbits are incredibly sensitive. It is at your own discretion if you wish to try this product and any use would unfortunately be going against our
advice.

We’ve not tried to dissolve them in water, so we are not sure if they would dissolve easily or not, but they aren’t
sugar coated at all. They have a light film coating which should
dissolve pretty easily
if required.

Milk Thistle is often used alongside NSAIDs such as Metacam and this might well be beneficial. It should be perfectly safe to do this. The main thing is to ensure that you do not overdose the Metacam and that you stop Metacam if there are signs of ill-health, such as vomiting, diarrhoea or going off food. (Having said that, Metacam is extremely safe in fact if you get these things right and it provides huge benefits to dogs which they cannot derive from other means.)

The liver diet has a range of factors intended to support dogs with liver problems. How many of these, if indeed any, are still of use to her is impossible for me to say. Generally speaking, ongoing liver problems are associated with weight loss, so I am unsure how much of a problem she still has.

I would also say that weight gain is much more a function of how much food is consumed rather than the type of food. If she is overweight, she has been eating too much. If you feed her less, she will lose weight. It really is as simple as that (as far as it goes. Feeding her less might leave her hungry, with all the attendant considerations that has, but health-wise, she just needs to eat less.) Lots of dogs are overweight on James Wellbeloved diets and they often need to be restricted in amount, especially as dogs get older and slower.

If she still has any liver issues, she is better off on the proper liver diet. The best way to tell would be some blood tests. As far as the Milk Thistle is concerned, personally I would be inclined to give it anyway. I might also stop the liver diet and feed whatever you want, but I am not in a position to be able to say that is the right thing to do. I would also feed the amount of food which produces the correct bodyweight, whichever food I chose. Her weight really is just a product of the amount she is eating, there is no mystique to it.

Dogs with a hepatic shunt do not typically have a damaged or "stressed" liver, so they are not so likely to benefit from this product. The shunt means of course that blood from the diggestive system is by-passing the liver completely and so is not being filtered and purified as it should be. This is usually more a surgical problem than a medical one. Your vet will be able to advise on measures you can take to alleviate it somewhat, but Milk Thistle I would expect to have no real effect in a typical case.

Tests for liver damage are very sensitive and so your dog might have a very minor/temporary problem. Hopefully that will be the case but would be sensible to repeat some blood tests periodically, to monitor how things are going. In the meantime these tablets would be a good idea to give to support the liver. The correct dose would be 5 tablets daily, given in 2 or 3 doses divided through the day.

Milk Thistle can in itself provide significant help for liver problems. However using just a straight herbal supplement would probably be less predictable than Hepatosyl. Lots of factors affect the usefulness of Milk Thistle ( such as growing and processing conditions). These things tend to be optimised better in proprietary brands (though that might equally apply to a good supplier of Milk Thistle.) However they still vary a great deal from batch to batch, let alone between brands. The levels of active ingredients are often not standardised or consistent. The extra ingredients in Hepatosyl Plus are however of more reliable and significant benefit, so I would choose this product personally.

The tablets are 1cm diameter and are usually fine to be given to dogs whole. If not you can split them into smaller parts or crushed and fed with food.