While there are many herbs which help to control epilepsy, such remedies are not intended for use in severe cases. If your condition is not responding to conventional medication, then it's unlikely it will respond to herbal medication either. Especially since, as Lazygardens pointed out, it's hit and miss with the dosages. Your doctor has recommended surgery, and I think you are left with just two options: have the surgery and give yourself a very good chance of improvement in your condition and your life; or not have the surgery, and continue as you are, with a very good chance of getting worse. I know which way I'd go! Meantime, include plenty of passionfruit in your diet!

Amber's Jack Russell has seizures and they are pretty frequent. He has been to Purdue for treatment and to so many vet's. He is on I think 3 medications and an herbal something she got from the vet. The herbal stuff has helped but he may have a seizure once a week. You never know when it will happen. It is bad to see and I have seen him have terrible ones and one right after another. I have held him while he was having them and we are hurrying to the vet's. Sometimes it is weather related, like a storm moving in. Your little Gracie is so sweet I wish the best for her. Sue

I also had been giving dream bones mini chews to my dogs. About 4 months ago my 7lb Chiweenie started throwing up blood and bloody stool 30 minutes after giving him the treat. I immediately took him to the vet where he had to spend the night. $400 later he got to come home. I didn't realize it was the treat as the vet said sometimes dogs get a intestinal virus. 3 days ago my short legged jack russell started the same thing. I took him to the vet the next morning when I found all the blood. 3 days later he got to come home. $1100 this time. I threw away all the dream bones treats that I had and will never buy these again. My dogs loved them and ate them for a couple years but my vet said that it was the treat that caused this. He got severely dehydrated and his kidneys were in bad shape. His white blood cell count was off. He was in really bad shape within a few hours. I am going to email the company and send them copies of my vet bills. We trust people to make stuff for our babies and then they poison them. I will never buy this product again and I will do everything I can to make sure no one else does either.

I can help with the costs, based on the prices at NC State vet school. Physical exam, neurological exam, and minimum data base (CBC, chem panel, UA, thyroid panel) is about $250. Since the dog in question hasn't had anything yet, if there is a specialist available I'd just do that because the PE and neuro exam is probably only about $40 more than the regular vet's physical exam, and you get it done by the boarded neurologist. Bloodwork costs usually about the same if the regular vet is using a send-out reference lab as the vet school. With those tests, you can rule out many metabolic and endocrine causes of seizures. One that wouldn't be ruled out is if the dog has a portosystemic shunt or other serious liver disease, then you'd diagnose that with a pre- and post- bile acids test, which runs about $100. It wouldn't be wrong to skip that test if liver disease was not high on the differential list. Next level of diagnosis is the tick born disease panel. At school, we have the super-duper tick panel that includes Ehlrichia canis, Babesia canis, Bartonella henselae, Bartonella vinsonii, Rickettsia rickettsii, and Borrelia burgdorferi for $100. Since both Ehlrichia and Bartonella can cause seizures and the dog can look relatively normal otherwise, that would be a good panel to run. Also both diseases are very treatable. Fungal diseases can also cause seizures, so you could test for those too. Apparently, NC State doesn't often run a fungal panel, because that isn't an option in the clin path lab. It may be something they send out, so I don't know the cost. Next step or somewhere in there would be a CSF tap. That requires general anesthesia. All together it would probably cost about $300, including CSF culture and sensitivity, cytology, and fluid analysis. If up to this point nothing is found, you could elect to stop diagnosis if 1) the dog is of an age where epilepsy would be common to occur (1-3 years) and is otherwise completely healthy and the labwork is completely normal or 2) if you weren't going to do anything about a brain tumor anyway (surgery or radiation). If you wanted to go all out, an MRI is $2000 and a CT is $1200. Like I said though, if you weren't interested in doing brain surgery, and I have no idea how much that would cost, and were just going to treat with anti-seizure medications in either case, then you could easily forego the brain scans. I found an article that said about 30% of seizures can be traced to an underlying cause. Which means that if the dog has recurring seizures, it is most likely to be due to epilepsy. Certain breeds are predisposed, and epilepsy usually starts between ages of 1-3 years. The emergency vet who saw Ana thought she had epilepsy, because she was the right age and right breed. He's still not entirely convinced that the sulfa drugs caused the seizure. But since she only had the one, I don't particularly care what the problem was because it's long gone. Labmomma- usually a dog with menigitis is very sick, so that was a really poor choice for an example. A better illustration would have been if I said the dog had Ehlrichia or Babesia, both of which can cause seizures in otherwise healthy dogs. So can fungal infections, many toxins, protozoal infections, and some metabolic disorders such as hypocalcemia.