Join us in celebrating Pet Dental Month!

February is Dental Month and we’re excited to offer a special on a complete dental prophylaxis treatment all month long!

How often do you go to the dentist? How often do you brush your teeth? Taking care of your teeth is important but so is taking care of your pets’ teeth. They don’t make doggie dentures!

And it’s not just dogs who need routine dental care: cats can have just as bad, if not worse, dental disease. Most dental problems cannot be seen on a routine physical exam because most pets don’t like strangers poking around in their mouths! The only reliable way to fully investigate your pets’ dental health is when performing a routine dental prophylaxis treatment. This is the same as when you go to the dentist for a “cleaning” every 6 months.

How do your pet’s teeth look?

Ideally, any pet with Stage 1 periodontal disease should have a dental prophylaxis performed to ensure there are no more severe issues and to prevent further disease. Certainly, every pet with Grade 2-4 should have teeth cleaned,  dental x-rays, and severely diseased teeth removed.

Our routine dental prophylaxis treatment includes:

• Pre-surgical bloodwork to ensure that your pet can physically handle anesthesia
• Anesthesia with a dedicated, trained anesthetist to make anesthesia as safe as possible
• Scaling with an ultrasonic scaler and hand scaling to clean debris from below the gumline.
• Polishing to smooth any roughness or grooves to help prevent further tartar buildup
• Fluoride treatment
• Pain medication to go home for any sore gums (especially important for those with severe dental disease)

While your pet is anesthetized and all that rock-hard tartar is off their teeth, we can fully examine each tooth to make sure it’s healthy and not damaged. If there are deep pockets in the gumline around a tooth, that can indicate deeper dental disease. Some teeth are only held in by tartar which we can’t know until that tartar is gone.

A thorough scaling and polishing gets rid of the tartar and the bacteria that created it. The bacteria concreted to your pets’ teeth can cause even worse damage than a loose or rotten tooth. Although a rotten tooth is painful and needs to be addressed in an urgent manner, the migration of bacteria from the mouth to other areas of the body (such as the heart and kidneys) can create an even more life threatening problem.

We see many older, small-breed dogs with severe dental disease who also developed a heart murmur due to vegatative endocarditis (bacterial nodules on the heart valves and elsewhere inside the heart). This causes the heart to not function properly and makes anesthesia unsafe. What happens if that pet has a tooth abscess due to the severe dental disease? It’s no longer as safe to anesthetize them as it would have been prior to the development of the heart disease. This is why having a cleaning done yearly to every 2 years is almost a must for many small-breed dogs. They’re also the ones who are less likely to allow tooth brushing so that the owner can keep up with teeth cleaning at home. If they allow tooth brushing, this can reduce the frequency that they need professional dental prophylaxis treatments.

I have also heard of some places offering “anesthesia-free teeth cleaning”. As wonderful as that sounds, it’s just not effective and is, truthfully, a waste of your money. It’s also lovely if the groomer will brush Fluffy’s teeth while she’s there but if you’re not doing it at home, one tooth brushing every 2 months isn’t going to do a whole lot of good in the long term. I don’t even want to think about what our teeth would look like if we only brushed them once every 2 months!!!

Because of the special pricing we’re offering to celebrate Dental Month, now is a great time to get your pets in for the dental care they need!