Dental Procedures for Cats

Video Transcript

"Hi this is Dr. Greg McDonald for Expert Village.com. I want to talk a little bit today about a dental prophy what your veterinarian would do if your cat has dental disease. We will go over some of these in more detail in other segments but for one thing that you have to think about is once your cat has dental disease they are going to need an anesthetic and the anesthetic is going to be given in a safe fashion. The new anesthetics now people get a little upset about the thought of an anesthetic but we are going to go over that as a total new segment. The new anesthetics are very safe. The reason you need an anesthetic is you've got to get down under the gum line in order to get the cleaning of where the real dental disease is. Ninety percent of the animals that I see have dental tartar have no gum disease and really don’t need any special medical care for that. You can do some special things like special diets, chew toys and things like that but they don’t need to have that prophrey cleaning. Once they disease down under the gum line, then you actually have to get down under the gum line to clean it. To get under the gum line you cannot do that when the animal is awake because it hurts them. If you hurt them they can hurt you and the other thing is that you are actually exposing the body to more bacteria so an animal even when we do just standard prophy in a veterinary hospital, we put the animal on an antibiotic to prevent them from having a secondary infection in another part of their body. Once your veterinary has decided that your cat does have a dental disease that would require a dental prophy, work with your veterinarian to find out a cost and anesthetics and the way they do it in their hospital. You know it is more than just cosmetics once you get up in the gum line with gum disease and so get in to your veterinarian and have it checked and you will find out the best care for your pet. "