Dr. Greenway discusses which remedies you can try at home before seeing the veterinarian if your dog or cat is vomiting or has diarrhea. Other topics covered in this video include signs when it is necessary to go in to the veterinary clinic, causes, dehydration, tips to take at home, and trial diets to resolve it.

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TRANSCRIPT:

A really common call we’ll get at the clinic is we’ll have people call and ask if it’s necessary to come in when their dog or cat has vomited or had some diarrhea. There’s a couple things you could do at home to see if you could solve this problem before going into your veterinary clinic and paying that expensive exam fee.

First what you’re going to want to do is stop feeding them for about 24 hours. If you feed them and their stomach or intestine is already inflamed because of something going on in there, then you’re just going to contribute to more vomiting and diarrhea. When this happens they also have water losses so the danger is that they can become dehydrated.

This is the reason obviously to give them access to fresh water but it also tells us that you’ve got to watch them very closely at that point to make sure that they’re not getting into more trouble. If they start to get dehydrated you’ll see that they’ll start to become lethargic and sluggish and that would be a real good reason to take them into the vet at that point to get them looked at.

There’s a couple other things you could try as well. If your dog is just having some diarrhea and you want to try something at home first, you could go to either a clinic or a pet food store and get a probiotic. What a probiotic is, is it’s seeding the gut with good bacteria and sometimes that’s all it takes to settle things down. That’s something you can try at home that’s really simple and easy and may not cost you an expensive veterinary visit.

When you do start to feed them again one of the things you can try to do is give them a very bland meal. You can make this at home by giving them a meal that is very small and is made up of three parts rice to one part boiled skinless chicken. You could exchange the rice for boiled potato and you can exchange the chicken for low-fat cottage cheese. By giving them this, it’s very bland, it’s low calorie and it’s easy on their digestive system. When you reintroduce that food, if they have further vomiting or diarrhea that would be a good reason to go in and see your veterinarian. What we try to do here is give you some advice so that you don’t have to run into the clinic every time.