Indie is a rescue German Shepherd who had been used to breed, on her first season. Her puppies were sold very early, and she ran away looking for them. After several months on a beef farm eating what she could find she eventually ended up in the pound. GS Rescue got the call to pick her up and I adopted her knowing she had ear problems.

The Vets gave her injections, and we brought home a small dog weary of anyone wanting to touch her ears. Brown gunk kept running out from her ears, she continually nibbled her body, and she started losing fur on her tummy. Black crinkly skin appeared next, and she smelt strange. I was sad that she was getting more and more withdrawn from her doggy friends, and a bit embarrassed when people asked what disease she had. After trying everything the vets suggested, which was more injections every month and special dry food, a friend suggested I talked to Maria at MicroMed.

(See small patch of black skin on tummy)

Maria explained the processes at play for Indie’s current health issues, about the impact of the injections on her immune system and organ function and how a systemic fungal overgrowth can play out in the body. Even though her whole body was reacting by the time we found MicroMed the first change was converting to raw food, with no beef and a monthly program of what we call ‘Indies supplements. Every night for the first two months I filled out a Symptom Sheet to return to Maria at MicroMed, with Indie’s symptom changes, so Maria could adjust the program as needed. The going got hard with various setbacks but I had faith we were making progress, at the pace Indie’s body would allow.

I saw the changes after 4 months with the ears not so stinky and small patches of fur growing back on her chest. There were flare ups when Indie ate rabbit poo, puriri berries or someone thought she needed their dinner as a treat.

I cannot say it was the easiest thing I have ever done, but we love Indie, and she is such a sweetie she deserved the best I could give her. She now runs around giving me sloppy dog love, where I am sure she hated the sight of me cleaning out her ears or rubbing MicroMed’s Intensive Regenerative Healing oil onto her black skin, but one day she lay down and presented her tummy for a rub. That
was when I knew we had turned the corner.

Indie looks good with a full coat, plenty of energy, has 10 doggy friends to play and is enjoying life. Indie is still on her raw diet, and we use MicroMed oral and topical spray every day without fail.

I am so grateful to Maria for explaining what I would need to do to get Indie back to what a German Shepherd should look like in health, and how Maria stuck with me when the setbacks happened.

Maria’s comments: Indie was an absolute honey to treat (and her owner was a delight to deal with) – and luckily, I had explained to her owner that the journey back to health was not going to be easy or straight forward. I explained it was like taking four steps forward in health and one step back into ill-health! You see, as Indie’s body strengthened, she was able to detoxify and have what’s known in
naturopathic medicine as a ‘healing crises', where the symptoms appear worse for a period of time.

The difference between a ‘worsening of symptoms indicating a slide towards ill-health’ and a ‘healing crisis’ is that in a healing crisis, the intensity and duration of each healing crisis as it occurs, lessens. So initially Indie’s healing crisis took a few weeks to pull out of, but over the months each subsequent healing crisis that arose became a faster and less severe event, until she eventually wasn’t really having healing crises anymore. In natural medicine it’s really important to support the body – basically for us humans to ‘get out of the way’ to allow the body to heal as it knows how. Often the way ill-health is dealt with is to ‘suppress’ the symptoms with medications, so although it appears the problem is ‘gone’ it's not, because the cause of the problem has not been dealt with.

In the case of an Internal Systemic Fungal Overgrowth, such as Indie was suffering, it had taken many factors to bring it about. High stress, a diet full of carbohydrates or sugars (which directly feed fungi and yeast), development of a Leaky Gut (caused by high stress and fungi, and certain medications) and an altered immune system (caused by certain medications) were all at play.

So, a ‘medication’ can switch off certain pathways so it appears there is no inflammation or symptoms anymore and this can work to a certain degree until such time as you stop the medication and then you are right back at square one again. In my opinion, you are far better to address the root causes and heal the body from the ground up, in keeping with the natural laws of healing. In Indie’s case, the raw diet being a species appropriate and low-inflammatory diet follows natural laws, as does providing a stress-free environment and providing natural nutrients like bone broth to repair the gut and other natural supplements that can help eradicate the fungal overgrowth. We also had to use a natural anti-inflammatory to tide us over while we did all the healing to get the body back to health where we then no longer needed the natural anti-inflammatory.

Indie’s ears occasionally play up still, but nowhere near as bad as they were, and they can be managed really easily now. The health journey is a continual process, as we live in such a toxic world compared to even 100 years ago. Indie will continue to strengthen and heal now that the negative lifestyle factors have been removed. The accumulated chemicals and heavy metals however can take many years to fully clear and often require specific herbs or ‘fat-soluble’ nutrients to be added into the programme, but I hold great hope that once all this is done the ears should no longer be a problem.