Dr. Greenway discusses heartworm prevention in dogs and in which situations it’s recommended to use medication. In this video we discuss medications, slow vs rapid kill, mosquitoes, prevalence, heartworm testing, costs, speaking to your veterinarian about questions and concerns, other reactions and allergic reactions.

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TRANSCRIPT:

This is Dr. Clayton Greenway with healthcareforpets.com. I wanted to talk about preventing heartworm disease in your dog. People make a choice about this, you have to decide for yourselves whether you want to prevent it or not. There are different medications that will prevent heartworm disease and so the first thing is is to check how often that occurs in your area where you live and you can ask your veterinarian about that.

Then you’ve got to decide about which preventative medication you want to use. It’s very important to realize that the two downsides to preventing heartworm disease is the cost of the medication and also giving your dog an anti-parasitic drug to prevent a disease it may not get. So you have to decide for yourself how much protection you want to have for your dog. When I talk to clients about this, basically we try to assess the risk of exposure to that disease. Some people prefer to not give their dog a medication and accept that risk. If their dog gets heartworm disease, it’s a real difficult thing to deal with, it’s expensive to treat and can really affect their health. The preventative medication has been known to be very safe but any dog could have a side effect to any medication. It’s also costly so you have to decide whether you want to implement that so that your dog is protected against heartworm disease. It’s very important to have that conversation with your veterinarian and make sure that you’re getting unbiased information about it, that you’re not being pressured into doing this for your dog because some areas, the chance of this is very, very low and you’re the one who’s making the health decisions for your pet. So make sure you get good information, don’t listen to anyone who tells you what to do and decide for yourself whether you would like to prevent that disease by buying the medication and using it on your pet.

You can find the other videos about testing for heartworm disease and general information about heartworm disease on our website at healthcareforpets.com.