Bloom Pet ad: Read This Before Your Next Vet Bill

BloomPet vs Zyrtec. Which one is the scam? I wrote those sticky notes myself and stuck them on my bathroom counter, and I'll tell you why. I spent thirty-one years as a fraud investigator for an insurance company in Wichita. Thirty-one years of people telling me stories. Whiplash nobody could see. Roofs that hailed out on a sunny day. I can smell a scam through a closed door. So when my wife Carol showed me an ad for a collagen dropper for itchy dogs, I did what I've done my whole working life. I opened a file. On one side of the counter, the bottle of Zyrtec. Brand name, sold in every drugstore in America, recommended by our vet. Bubba had been on it twice a day for a year and a half. On the other side, a dropper from a company I'd never heard of, that I'd found on Facebook, which is where every scam I ever closed got started. You'd think that's an easy call. Here's my file. Bubba is six. An American bulldog, ninety pounds, white with a brown patch over one eye, and he thinks he's a lap dog. He was on Zyrtec twice a day for eighteen months. He licked his paws every night anyway. He scratched in his sleep anyway. He had a red belly and red armpits and the smell, and we bathed him every week anyway. Eighteen months of a brand-name pill, and the only thing it reliably did was make him drowsy. The Facebook dropper had a 90-day money-back guarantee. The Zyrtec didn't come with anything. So which one was the scam? I didn't know yet. So I did what an investigator does. I asked somebody who knew more than me. My granddaughter, who's in vet school, and who asked me three questions I couldn't answer. Read this entire post. Every word. It's long because eighteen months is long. MY NAME IS GARY My name is Gary Pruett. I'm 66, and I live in Wichita, Kansas, with Carol, who has been right about most things for forty-two years. Thirty-one years investigating insurance claims. I retired with a reputation for saying no. Bubba came from a farm outside Hutchinson as a pup. He sleeps on the floor of our bedroom on an old comforter, and he snores, and I don't mind the snoring. It was the other sounds that got me. So when Bubba stopped sleeping, so did I. HOW IT WENT He was four when it started. It started with his paws. Licking at night. Then his belly went pink, then red. Then the armpits, and the smell. If you've had an itchy dog you know the smell. Corn chips left in a hot car. Dr. Pham said allergies and told me to try an antihistamine from the drugstore. She gave me a dose for his weight. So I bought a box of Benadryl. Every night I'd press a pill into a ball of cheese, and every night, twenty minutes later, Bubba would drop onto his bed like somebody switched him off. I thought it was working. He was quiet. I could finally go to sleep. By spring he was licking again by morning. So I did what everybody in the dog groups said. I switched to Zyrtec. It seemed better for about three weeks. Then I went to Zyrtec twice a day. I tried Claritin for a month, and went back to Zyrtec. I bought oatmeal sprays and "itch relief" sprays that smelled like a department store. Baby socks for his back feet. He ate two pairs. A cone. Then a softer cone. Allergy chews, the soft kind, that he loved and that did absolutely nothing. Vet visits. A skin scrape. More antihistamines. Every receipt went into a shoebox in the hall closet. I didn't add them up. I didn't want to know. THE NIGHT I KNEW I'm not an emotional man. Carol will tell you. Thirty-one years of fraud files will do that to you. But one night in January I got up at three for a glass of water, and Bubba was in the kitchen, standing at the back door, licking his front paw. Ninety pounds of dog, standing on three legs in the dark, licking. He didn't want out. He just didn't want to wake us up. That's what got me. He'd learned to go to another room so he wouldn't bother us. I sat down on the kitchen floor with him and put my hand on his back, and he leaned his whole weight into me, and I thought, eighteen months of a brand-name pill and this is where we are. I investigated other people's problems for thirty-one years. I'd never once investigated my own dog's. MADDIE My granddaughter Maddie is twenty-five and in her third year of vet school at Kansas State. She came home for her mother's birthday, saw the sticky notes on my bathroom counter, and laughed at me for a full minute before she sat down to help. She doesn't have a clinic. She doesn't sell anything. What she has is a textbook the size of a cinder block and a lot of student loans. She sat at the kitchen table and listened to the whole thing, all the way back to the beginning. Then she went to the cabinet where we kept Bubba's stuff, and she started picking things up and reading the labels. She held up the bag of soft chews. Collagen, it said, right there on the front. "Was it cooked?" she said. Of course it was cooked. It's a chew. "Heat breaks collagen down," she said. "By the time it's a crunchy little bone, there isn't much left his skin can use. You bought a collagen chew. What he ate was a treat." She picked up the next one. "Read me what animal it's from." Chicken. Big picture of a chicken on the front. "Chicken is one of the things itchy dogs react to most," she said. "You've been feeding a dog with angry skin a supplement made from something that can make it angrier." Then she held up the pill bottle. "This one is a good medicine. It turns down the itch signal. But tell me, how long did it hold the first time, and how long does it hold now?" Months, then. Weeks, now. "Right. Because it doesn't fix what's letting the itch in. It turns down the alarm. And the thing underneath keeps getting worse." Then she said the sentence I've repeated to a dozen people since. "Grandpa, you didn't test the right thing. You tested the wrong versions of it." She pulled up a picture on her phone from one of her rotations: a white bulldog named Bentley, raw belly, before and after six weeks on a liquid marine collagen. Same dog. Different skin. WHAT IS ACTUALLY WRONG "Grandpa, his skin is built," Maddie said. "Like anything you build, it's made of parts. And the main part is collagen. If the part is missing, no amount of oil on the engine fixes it." Here's what Maddie explained, in plain English, the way I wish somebody had explained it to me eighteen months ago. A dog's skin is a barrier. It's the thing that keeps the outside world on the outside. Pollen. Dust. Grass. Mold. Ragweed. Whatever's on the floor and whatever's in the air. A big part of what holds that barrier together is collagen. Mostly types I and III. That's the material. It's what keeps the skin thick and tight and closed. When that barrier is strong, the world stays outside. When it develops gaps, everything gets in. Not one thing. Everything, every day, all at once. That's why the allergy test comes back with a list as long as your arm. That's why changing the food never quite settled it. That's why it's the paws AND the belly AND the armpits AND the ears. It isn't that he's allergic to everything. It's that his skin isn't keeping anything out anymore. His immune system sees all of that coming through and does its job. It sounds the alarm. That alarm is the itch. And bully breeds get it worst. Pits, Staffies, bulldogs, Frenchies. Short single coat. Pale, thin skin. There's almost nothing between the world and them. When their barrier opens up, it opens up everywhere at once. Now here's what everything I'd tried actually does. The pills turn the alarm down. The shots block one of the messengers that carries the itch. The antihistamines make him drowsy. The shampoos wash the top layer clean. Good things, most of them. They do exactly what they're built to do. Not one of them touches the barrier. So he feels better for a while, and underneath, the gaps stay open. More gets in. The alarm fires harder. And the same pill, the same shot, the same bath covers less and less of it. That's why it worked, then stopped holding. It didn't quit. It was never built to fix the wall. IT WAS NEVER YOUR FAULT I need to stop here and say something, because nobody said it to me for eighteen months. It isn't your dog's fault. And it isn't yours. You did what you were told. You filled every prescription. You bought the food. You gave the pill on time, in cheese, every night. You went without things you needed so he could have what the vet said he needed. That isn't a bad owner. That's the best owner there is. And your vet isn't a bad vet either. Mine has fifteen minutes and a waiting room full of dogs. She stops the itch that's in front of her. That's what the visit is built for. Nobody in that fifteen minutes has time to ask why the itch keeps coming back. Nobody failed. Everybody was treating the alarm. Nobody ever showed us the wall. WHAT I USED The one Maddie pointed me to is called Bloom Triple Collagen. It's a liquid. Marine collagen from deep-sea cod, types I and III, plus hyaluronic acid to help the skin hold its moisture, and glucosamine. No chicken. No beef. Nothing baked. Nothing to chew. One dropper on his food, once a day. That's the whole routine. I'll be honest with you. I almost didn't order it. I've been taken before. Everybody with an itchy dog has. I closed hundreds of them for a living. I see so many ads for itchy dogs now that I scroll right past them. But it came with a 90-day money-back guarantee. If his skin didn't change, I'd get my money back. Nobody running a scam hands you ninety days to catch them. And more than 100,000 dogs were already on it. You can fool a lot of people once. You don't keep 100,000 of them. So I ordered it that night. Bubba licked the dropper before I could get it to the bowl. Carol said that counts. WEEK BY WEEK I kept notes in a case file, an actual manila folder, because I'm that kind of man. Here's what's in them. Week 1: Nothing. Same as always. Bubba licked his paws at night. I felt foolish. Week 2: Licking his paws less in the daytime. I think. Pads not as red. Week 3: The smell is fading. I got down and sniffed his paws like a crazy person to make sure. Week 4: The red under his front legs is going pink. He went a whole evening without licking. Week 5: Bubba slept in the bedroom all night. Didn't go to the kitchen once. I checked at 3 a.m. Old habits. Week 6: I have to tell you about week six on its own. WEEK SIX On a Wednesday night in week six, I went to bed expecting what I always expected. The click of his nails going to the kitchen around three, and the licking. I woke up and the sun was in the window. I hadn't woken up once. Not at one. Not at two. Not at three. Bubba was on his comforter in our bedroom, flat on his side, snoring loud enough to rattle the closet door. Breathing slow. Still. I lay there a long time so I wouldn't wake him. And I'll tell you the truth about that morning. It wasn't that he'd stopped scratching, though that was wonderful. It was that for the first time in eighteen months, I hadn't spent the night lying there listening for him, wondering what kind of person lets their dog suffer three feet away. I'd been carrying that a long time. I put it down that morning. Week 8: Dr. Pham looked at his belly and armpits and asked what we'd changed. I gave her the file. Month 3: Paws white. Belly pink. Bathed him once this month, and that was because he found a mud puddle. WHAT EIGHTEEN MONTHS COST I pulled the receipts into the manila folder and added up every receipt. I'd been afraid to. Here it is. Zyrtec, eighteen months, twice a day: $540 Vet visits: $690 Medicated shampoo: $286 Sprays and wipes: $174 Allergy chews: $168 Cone: $39 Total: $1,897. Case closed. Every one of those dollars went to quieting the alarm. Not one of them went to the wall. THE STICKY NOTES The sticky notes are still on my bathroom counter. Carol wants them gone. I added one more. It says: "File closed. Not a scam." Thirty-one years, I never closed a file without evidence. I had the evidence. It was asleep on the comforter. WHAT PEOPLE ASK ME Since I started telling people about Bubba, I get the same questions over and over. Most of them sound like me a year ago. So here they are. "It's a scam." That's what I thought too. It has a 90-day money-back guarantee. A scam takes your money and runs. It doesn't give you ninety days to catch it. "I've tried everything. Nothing works." So had I. Look at my list. But everything I tried worked on the itch. Nothing I tried worked on the barrier. That's not trying everything. That's trying one thing a dozen different ways. "I already tried collagen." Turn the bag around and read the back. Baked? Powder? Chicken? Then you haven't tried the kind that matters. "If it's that good, why didn't my vet tell me?" Because your vet has fifteen minutes and a dog that's itching right now. Her job is to stop it today. Mine did exactly that, every time. Nobody had time to ask why it kept coming back. "My dog won't take supplements." Bubba won't take a pill unless it's buried in cheese. This isn't a pill. It's one dropper on his food. He doesn't even know it's there. "How fast does it work?" In our house: the paws by week two, the smell by week three, sleep by week six. The fur comes last. Skin is slow. Give it the full ninety days. WHERE TO GET IT It's called Bloom Triple Collagen. Liquid marine collagen from cod, types I and III, plus hyaluronic acid and glucosamine. One dropper on food, once a day. More than 100,000 dogs are on it. Right now they're running a fall allergy sale. One bottle is $19.99 instead of $59.99. Buy 2 and the third one is free, $39.98 with free shipping. Or buy 3 and get 2 free, five bottles for $59.97, about $12 a bottle, with free express shipping. It comes with a 90-day money-back guarantee. That's the full course, on them. Do what I did. Open a file. The guarantee gives you ninety days to close it. 👇 https://bloompet.co/products/bloom-triple-collagen EDIT: A lot of you asked where to get it. Please only buy it from their own website. It isn't sold on Amazon, and I've seen look-alike bottles over there with almost the same name. Here's the real one again so you don't have to scroll. https://bloompet.co/products/bloom-triple-collagen P.S. Maddie says she's going to bring my sticky notes to her dermatology rotation. I told her I want them back. P.P.S. If your dog is young and has only just started licking his paws at night, you are where I was eighteen months ago. Don't spend eighteen months and $1,897 finding out what I found out. Start now, while it's still a small leak.