Why I Chose Amazing Turmeric for Honey

Honey is ten years old, about seventy pounds, a yellow Labrador mix who came home from the county shelter at two years old. In January she started standing up stiff after her naps. Not every time, and not dramatically. Just enough that I noticed from the kitchen. By spring she was taking the three back porch steps one at a time instead of in the happy scramble I had watched for eight years.

In June our vet examined her and said early arthritis in both hips, mild in the left elbow. No surgery, no prescription pain medication. She recommended Cosequin and a fish oil, and I wrote both down in the notebook I keep on the kitchen counter, because Honey is my first dog and I am the sort of person who writes things down.

By early September the shelf next to the refrigerator was getting crowded, and that is when I added Amazing Nutritionals Turmeric for Dogs. A friend from church had mentioned turmeric weeks before. I did not take her word for it and I did not dismiss it. I read the listing slowly with a pen, the way I used to read a book review before putting the book in a second grader's hands. Then I asked our vet whether it was fine to add.

She said it was fine. So since early September, about two months now, Honey gets one chewable tablet with her dinner, per the label for her weight. I am going to tell you exactly what I have seen and what I have not, because the second part is the part most listings leave out.

Four things is a lot to keep straight, and I am the sort who wants to know which one is doing the work. So each of Honey's has a page in the notebook: the date we started, what the label calls for at her weight, and a line every Sunday about how she did on the back porch steps. It is not science. It is a habit from thirty-two years of running a school library, where if you do not write it down it did not happen.

The page for the Amazing Nutritionals bottle is the newest one and the shortest one, because there is not much to say yet.

Two months in, there is no change I can honestly pin on the turmeric. I am keeping it to the end of the bottle before I decide, and I am writing that in the notebook too.

Here is what the label actually tells me, because I think that is the useful part. The Amazing Nutritionals bottle holds 120 chewable tablets, bacon and beef liver flavored. The item form is a tablet and the package is five by three by three inches, 4.16 ounces, which is small enough to tuck on a shelf without rearranging anything. It is gluten free, peanut free and soy free, made in the United States, and the target species is dog, with large breed size noted. That is the whole of it. I wrote it on one page and there was room left over.

I give one with her dinner, per the label for her weight, and our vet agreed to that. Honey takes it without any fuss, which was not a given. She is polite about most things but she has opinions about texture, and a tablet she did not want would have ended up on the tile floor and stayed there until I picked it up.

What I have seen: nothing I can separate out. There has been no morning where she rose from her nap like a younger dog. She still waits on cold mornings for me to put a hand under her hips and help her into the back seat of the car. What I have not seen: any stomach upset, any refusal, any reason to stop. When your dog is already taking three things, no news is a good outcome, and I am not going to dress that up as more than it is.

What I will not do is repeat the claim on the listing itself and tell you turmeric cures joint pain. I am not a veterinarian and I am not going to pretend to be one over coffee. The honest framing is this: turmeric curcumin is something people have given dogs for a long time, no tablet takes the place of the diagnosis our vet made in June, and the label on this bottle is short and plain, which is the thing I liked most about it.

There is a version of this where I noticed a difference in three days and you should hurry out and buy something. I have been reading long enough to know that version gets written whether or not it is true. Mine is duller and I think more useful. I put the chew on the shelf beside the fish oil and the mussel chews, and I set a date to sit down with the notebook and ask myself whether a fourth thing is earning its place.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would say start with your vet, not with a listing. Get the diagnosis first, because a dog who is stiff after a nap and a dog with a torn ligament look the same from across a kitchen and deserve different answers. I would say that if your dog is already on three things, write them all on one page before you add a fourth and bring that page to the appointment, because a vet cannot count what she cannot see. If your page comes back short and your vet says a turmeric supplement is fine to try, Amazing Nutritionals is the one I chose, and I chose it because the label is plain, the bottle fits on the shelf, and Honey takes it without an argument. I would tell you not to expect a transformation and not to expect nothing, because I have had two months of neither. That is my experience with one dog in one autumn, not instructions for yours. Honey is better than she was in June and she is not cured, and both of those are true at once, which is the most honest thing I can hand you.