Hannah Zulueta He’s Due
A rabies booster, two constitutions, and the old idea that a poison is a poison until you know whose body it lands in.
His body decided what the vaccine would mean.
Two of my dogs got the same shot a month apart. One walked away with nothing. The other needed three formulas over three weeks. Here is what actually happened, and how TCM reads the difference.
Overdue
Mr. Higgins goes to the same vet his breeder uses. That was pure luck, and it paid off early: she let me push his first rabies shot past the standard four month mark, out to a year, so his body had more time to get strong before it had to meet one. After that I mostly kept him away from the vet. Partly because he was healthy. Partly because every visit is a chance for someone to notice a booster is coming due, and I wanted to put that off as long as I honestly could.
His teeth are what finally broke the streak. The buildup was not bad, but I am particular about their teeth, more particular than most owners, and by the time he was four and a half years old it was time for his first dental. The tech pulled up his file before I even sat down. “He’s due for his rabies booster.” Once he was back in their system, the booster was always going to surface.
Why I checked the numbers first
Two of my three dogs already carry the legal requirement on a normal schedule: one is exempt for an allergic reaction, the other comes in every three years. The exempt one is Orbit. Years ago she had a real reaction to this same vaccine: swelling, drooling, an emergency visit hours after what was supposed to be routine. I wrote about it at the time. One fact from that research has stuck with me since: a ten pound Boston Terrier gets exactly the same milliliter of vaccine as a hundred and seventy five pound Great Dane. Nobody adjusts the dose for the dog in front of them. Orbit has carried an exemption letter ever since her reaction, and that history is exactly why I do not walk into a rabies appointment casually for any of them, Mr. Higgins included.
Before I said yes for him, I pulled the county’s actual numbers. A domestic animal has not tested positive for rabies in San Diego since 1968. Not fifteen years. Fifty-some. The cases that do turn up almost always trace back to bats. I am not against the vaccine. I have watched what it did for a population that used to lose children to rabid bobcats in this same county. I am against pretending a needle is nothing, especially for a dog whose body has never had to process one before.
Two dogs, same shot
So I did not just show up and let it happen. Three days before, and three days after, I gave him Moshen’s GUARD, the formula we reach for in pediatrics, dog or human, when a young system is about to meet something it has never met before. Then I watched him.
A month before Mr. Higgins, Maggie went through the same appointment: same booster, same dental. All she got from me was that same GUARD protocol, three days before and three days after. That was the whole story for her. No itching, no mucus, nothing further needed.
Maggie is what TCM calls Liver Blood Excess, and you do not need the term to see it. Stand next to her and you can feel it: a held strength, the kind of strength a football player has. Mr. Higgins runs the opposite pattern, Liver Deficient, smaller framed. In TCM you ask this before almost anything else: is the body in front of you strong or weak? Maggie’s answer let her clear the vaccine and move on with her life. His body needed more support to clear the vaccine’s effects.
Maggie
Liver Blood ExcessMr. Higgins
Liver DeficientWatching is not passive
Some of what follows I can only do because of where I am in my own training. Between the doctorate and the years of practice before it, I keep a small dispensary of my own at home, and I take real liberty with my own dogs because of it. Watching, dosing, adjusting week to week is something I do for my own dogs. I do not call the vet every time Mr. Higgins itches, and I do not treat his teeth myself either. Dental work, trauma, labwork, anything structural or diagnostic: that is the vet’s, every time. I know exactly where my lane ends, and I stay in it.
I am a fourth year doctoral student now, about to start a two year Kampo intensive on top of it, and this is exactly the tradition that keeps pulling at me. A physician named Todo Yoshimasu built it, Japan’s own branch of Chinese medicine, around one idea: every disease is a single poison, and the doctor’s job is to find where it sits and get it out. He refused to theorize about mechanisms he could not see with his own eyes. He just tracked the poison and moved it. I thought about him again, hard, the week Mr. Higgins started itching.
Which kind of cause is this?
It got messy before it got clear. He picked up fleas around the same time, and so did the other two, which meant a second, unrelated cause sitting on top of the first. For a week I genuinely could not tell which one was making him scratch. I cleared the fleas from the house first. He kept itching, and about two weeks after the shot, mucus showed up in his stool too.
TCM sorts every cause of disease into one of three categories. Here is where a vaccine and a flea actually land.
Tap each to see what’s ruled in and what’s ruled out.
The emotions
Anger, joy, worry, grief, fear, shock. Not part of this case.
The climate
Wind, cold, heat, damp, dryness, summerheat. Not part of this case either. There was no fever, no chill, none of the usual signs of a body fighting something at its border.
Everything else
Overexertion, diet, injury, parasites, poison, wrong treatment. A vaccine and a flea both live here. That is the whole reason it took a week to tell them apart.
Nothing else had changed. Same rotation of recipes, no new food, no new treats. In four years I can count his episodes of diarrhea or mucus on one hand, so this was not a dinner bowl problem. That left the vaccine as the only real candidate, and the pattern it produced told me exactly where to start. I never needed a lab test to confirm any of it. A Chinese herbal formula is called a fang, which just means ballpark. You do not need the exact coordinates of what is happening inside a body, only the right neighborhood, and you correct course as the pattern moves. That is the same refusal to guess at mechanisms Todo Yoshimasu built his whole practice on.
Where the poison actually landed
A vaccine does not fight its way past the surface the way wind or cold does. It goes in through a needle, straight past the gate his body would normally defend at. There was no fever, no chill, none of the usual signs of a body meeting something at its border. TCM has always read illness this way, by how deep it sits and which direction it is moving: surface, hinge, interior. His case sat in the middle of that map from day one, because the poison never had to fight for control of the surface to begin with. It showed up instead in the digestive and Spleen network, as damp heat, the pattern you get when something has to be metabolized from the inside because it never had to be repelled from the outside. The mucus was the clearest sign of that, so that is what I aimed at. I reached for Si Miao San to stabilize it, and it did its job. Within days the mucus was gone.
The hinge, not the finish
The itch presentation stayed after the mucus resolved. The next formula was Xiao Chai Hu Tang, and the switch was deliberate. I have also taken a clinical course taught by Heiner Fruehauf, and one thing that has stayed with me is his caution around cooling herbs. Health, in the Fire School approach he teaches, comes from calling the body’s yang back up, not from chasing heat down with something cold. I did not want to hold the damp heat down and call it finished. I wanted the qi actually moving again. Xiao Chai Hu Tang works the hinge between exterior and interior, neither pushing in nor holding down, just keeping the door open so whatever is left has somewhere to go.
Cooling settles the flare. It does not rebuild the yang underneath it.
The finishing move
The last week, I switched again, to Si Wu Xiao Feng Yin, a formula that nourishes blood while it disperses wind. There is an old line in dermatology that explains why this is the finishing move and not the opening one: to treat the wind, we have to treat the blood first. Move the blood, and the wind puts itself out on its own. The poison came in the unnatural way, bypassing his surface entirely. It had to leave the natural way, through his skin, as wind. That is the direction healing runs even when the illness did not arrive by the usual road.
My herbal treatment vector
He is not itching anymore. The last formula worked immediately. Not gradually, not partially, not even within a day: the itching stopped right away.
You might reasonably ask why I did not just begin there. TCM does not let you skip to the finishing move. The pattern has to be read in the order it actually shows up in, and what was in front of me first was a Shao Yang picture, the hinge stage, not yet ready for a formula built to nourish blood and disperse wind. He stayed on Xiao Chai Hu Tang for about half a week to clear that stage properly before I moved him to Si Wu Xiao Feng Yin to finish it.
This was the vector I actually walked him through, one stage at a time.
Questions I’d ask
Does every dog need three formulas after a vaccine?
No. Maggie needed one, GUARD, and nothing else. The number of formulas was never the point. The constitution decided it.
Is this specific to the rabies vaccine?
No. The same logic applies to any single poison introduced directly, rather than met at the surface the way a normal illness would be. Rabies vaccine is just the case I have.
What does TCM mean by surface, hinge, interior?
A system for how deep an illness sits and which way it is moving. Surface is where the body meets the outside world directly. Interior is deep, involving the organs themselves. Hinge sits between the two, the place a body gets stuck when it cannot finish fighting something off or let something go. Formulas are chosen by which layer a case is actually sitting in, not by the symptom’s name. That is why the same itch got three different formulas over three weeks. It never stopped being one condition. It just kept moving.
How do I find a TCVM vet for my own dog?
Chi University keeps a directory of their TCVM-certified graduates. Search it by zip code, city, or region to find someone practicing near you: Chi University’s alumni directory.
I still check him more carefully than the other two for a while yet, the way you watch a door after you finally get it to close properly. But I go back to that line from the tech, he’s due, and I think about how much of medicine, old and new, comes down to the same question. Not why did this happen. Just: where is it now, and which way does it need to go.
I am sharing this as a case study because I was recently asked what to do about a friend’s dog, itching again after a vaccine. I did not have a single answer, because there is not one. Same poison, different bodies, different responses. Maggie and Mr. Higgins live in the same house and prove that better than I could explain it in the abstract. If a vet, or another dog owner curious how I actually handle this in my own home, wants to see it, this is that. Not a protocol to copy. A way of looking at the body in front of you.
If you need this for your own dogTCM Dietetics starts with the dog actually in front of you, not a template. If you are trying to work out what is really behind a reaction like this, a vaccine, a food, a flare that will not resolve, that is exactly what a consult is for.
California Department of Public Health, Rabies Surveillance in California Annual Report 2022: cdph.ca.gov
County of San Diego HHSA, Rabies program page: sandiegocounty.gov
Hannah Zulueta obtained her Certificate in Canine Nutrition from CASI Institute. She is also studying for her Doctorate in Acupuncture, Traditional Chinese Medicine, and Herbalism from the esteemed Pacific College of Health and Medicine. If you’re as keenly interested in health for yourself, visit her website for human health: Satori Acupuncture and Herbs.
She resides in San Diego with her three dogs, Maggie, Orbit, and Mr. Higgins.
She is available for one on one consultations. She develops evidence-based recipes that meet both NRC and AAFCO nutritional standards while integrating the therapeutic food principles of Traditional Chinese Veterinary Medicine into her formulations.
Additionally, you can find her sharing free content on Instagram.
