When Does My Dog or Cat Need a Dental Cleaning?

Dr. Greenway discusses how you can tell if your dog or cat needs a professional dental cleaning and when to have it performed so that it is most cost-effective. Topics covered in this video include the optimal time to clean teeth, dental disease, tooth decay, neck lesions, cavity, gingivitis, when to perform a cleaning, general anesthesia, blood work, heart, scaling, polishing, prophy, tooth assessment, dental X-rays and oral infections.

TRANSCRIPT:

I’m Dr. Clayton Greenway with healthcareforpets.com. One of the questions I get a lot is when to perform a dental cleaning? And I think this is really important to think about. I think there’s a lot of veterinarians out there that tell people all the time that their pet’s have dental disease and they do it’s just that they may be pushing a little hard to get you into perform that cleaning and let’s face it it’s expensive.

So what I try to do is I try to think about providing the best healthcare but making it cost-effective so what I like to think about is when to perform it. This always reminds me of a conversation I once had with my dentist. She would always ask me, “Now you recommend to your clients that they do a dental cleaning on their pets every year” and I said are you crazy? If I said that, they would think I’m just trying to get them in often but at the end of the day she did that and I do that for my pet’s but that doesn’t mean everyone has to do that. So you have to find what’s right for you and it’s really important that you work with a vet that goes along with what you want as far as providing the level of healthcare and the amount of money you’re spending.

The best thing to do is to take a look in your pet’s mouth and probably if you’re trying to do it the most cost-effective way, then you should be performing a dentistry when they have a dental score of two, and you can take a look at our videos to find out exactly when that is. Basically, it’s when there’s a lot of tartar on the teeth and that there’s just the start of gingivitis which is a red inflammation of the gums. Once that gingivitis develops, a dental cleaning will not reverse that completely. It will reverse all the tartar on the teeth so if you take a look at our dental scoring videos and look for the dental score of two and your pet fits that, that would be the right time to consider a dentistry. Any amount of tartar on the teeth you can perform a dentistry so you could be doing it every year but if you want to be cost-effective, you could try to do it before there’s irreversible disease and that would be a dental score of two.

You can take a look at those videos you can also read the article on this page about pet dental care for more information because what’s most important to us is your pet’s health here at healthcareforpets.com.

Summary

Title

When Does My Dog or Cat Need a Dental Cleaning?

Description

Dr. Greenway discusses how you can tell if your dog or cat needs a professional dental cleaning and when to have it performed so that it is most cost-effective.