Embrace Pet Insurance Blog

Guest Post: Why have your dog's teeth cleaned by a vet anyway?

2010-02-04T08:04:00-05:00

Today, we have a guest post from Dr. Rex Riggs, owner of Best Friends Veterinary Hospital in Powell, Ohio. He is a veterinarian, and an Advisory Board member of Embrace Pet Insurance. Dr. Riggs and one of his vet techs, Ellen Winkler RVT, writes about dental health and teeth cleaning. _________________________________

If you are ever curious as to what happens if teeth go for years without brushing (or you want to show your children what will become of their teeth if they fail to brush regularly), you have only to look at your pet’s teeth and smell your pet’s breath.

The leading sign of periodontal disease is bad breath. Periodontal disease is a problem that affects 85% of pets by three years of age. Daily tooth brushing and regular dental cleanings are crucial to the health of your pet.

There is little difference between the dog or cat’s tooth and the human tooth. We all have a set of baby teeth that come in and fall out to make way for adult teeth. We all have nerves and blood vessels in our teeth surrounded by dentin, which is surrounded by a hard coat of enamel. The enamel is bathed in saliva and quickly covered by plaque which is bacteria mixed with saliva. If we do not regularly disinfect our pet’s mouths and brush away the plaque, the plaque will mineralize into tartar (also called calculus– the gritty material the dental hygienist scrapes away). The bacteria that accumulate can cause damage by infecting the bone and ligament that holds the tooth in.

Eventually the tooth is lost and, if the bone damage is severe enough, the jaw can actually break. Gingivitis is reversible. Bone loss, once it starts, is not reversible. Worse still, bacteria of the mouth can invade other areas of the body leading to infection in the heart, liver, kidney, or virtually anywhere the blood stream carries them.

It should not be surprising that dental health requires regular professional cleaning. Home care of the teeth, while great, does not replace the need for professional cleaning. The cleaning done performed at your veterinarian is done while under anesthesia and includes many steps.

Here is a brief overview of what is involved in a routine dental cleaning for your pet:

Gross (visible) tartar is removed with hand scalers.
More delicate tartar deposits are removed from the gum line with ultrasonic scalers.
Periodontal pockets are probed and measured to assess periodontal disease.
The roots are planed, (meaning tartar is scraped from below the gum line) until the roots are smooth.
The enamel is polished to remove any unevenness left by tartar removal.
The mouth is disinfected and treated with a fluoride sealer.
Professional notes are taken on a dental chart, noting abnormalities on each of the dog’s 42 teeth, or the cat’s 30 teeth.
X-rays are taken of any abnormal teeth.

Below are pictures of a before and after of a typical dental cleaning. An abcess shows up as a black halo around the tooth root in an x-ray, which just goes to show the importance of dental x-rays because we could not see this on a normal dental exam.

It is important to note that a non-anesthetic teeth cleaning, what groomers sometimes offer, is not comparable to the above service. It is impossible to perform a total cleaning on a pet without general anesthesia. Cosmetic cleanings do not address periodontal disease where it occurs; under the gum line.

Related Posts: other posts by Dr Riggs ___________________________________________

Dr. Rex Riggs grew up in Wadsworth, Ohio, near Akron. Dr Riggs is co-owner of Best Friends Veterinary Hospital in Powell, Ohio. He is also on the board of the North Central Region of Canine Companions of Independence, a board member of The Ohio State College of Veterinary Medicine Alumni Society and Small Animal Practitioner Advancement Board at The Ohio State College of Veterinary Medicine. Dr. Riggs lives in Lewis Center with his wife Nancy, their two dogs Boo and Maggie, and two cats Franklin and Speeder. Outside of work, Dr. Riggs is an avid golfer and enjoys travel and photography.

Do you have to go for a pet check up before you buy your pet insurance policy?

2010-02-03T08:21:00-05:00

A visitor to our offices asked me this question the other day and I looked at her dumb-founded with myself for forgetting that not everyone knows these things.

With most pet insurance policies, the answer is no, you do not have to go for a pet check up to buy your pet insurance policy. A check up is not part of the purchase of a pet insurance policy.

With Embrace Pet Insurance policies, there are no requirements for a health check up before you buy. We do require you to have been to the vet for a medical examination in the year before you buy your policy but then, that's not really a tough requirement for most people.

Even if you haven't been to your vet in the last 12 months, you can go right after you buy your policy. That way, you can get your policy started before something happens you wish you'd had the insurance for.

Make sense?

Embrace Core Values

2010-02-02T07:55:00-05:00

We have been getting in touch with our inner Embrace lately. Answering questions such as What makes us tick as a company? What lies behind everything we do? What does it mean to be an Embracer?

It's not easy to do but very rewarding. Here's what we came up with.

Embrace Core Values

Open & Honest:
Open and honest actions and communications come first and they guide all that we do. We do the right thing for our pet parents and partners and they will do the same for us.

Personal Responsibility:
We take responsibility for our own success at work, our relationships with pet parents and co-Embracers, and our own learning. Titles and roles do not matter when it comes to getting the job done. We believe we can do it, and we do it today.

Customer Fixation:
We respect our Embraced pet parents above all else and never forget that they come to us by choice. We share a personal responsibility to maintain our pet parents' loyalty & trust, which must never be taken for granted. We listen and respond to our pet parents and seek to WOW them at every turn.

Innovation:
We thrive on creativity and ingenuity. We seek the innovations and ideas that can change the pet world. We use technology to further our goals. We are not afraid to take informed, responsible risk. We do more with less. We don't take shortcuts on quality.

Community & Environment:
We are passionate about making an impact on the pet world. We are committed to serving both the pet community at large & our own communities at home. We respect our environment & recycle, reuse, & reduce our waste wherever & whenever we can.

Passion:
We believe humor is essential to success. We don’t talk corporate-speak and we provide surprisingly personal but professional care. We celebrate achievement. We share our daily lives with our pets. We do the happy dance at work and wear our slippers in the office.

What do you think?

February is Pet Dental Health Month at Embrace Pet Insurance

2010-02-01T09:12:00-05:00

Well actually, it's Pet Dental Month pretty much everywhere in keeping with AVMA (the American Veterinary Medical Association) who promotes dental care this month.

On the Embrace blog, we'll be talking about pet insurance and dental accidents, illness, and wellness - all of which Embrace covers.

But first, some basic facts about pet teeth you might not have known:

dogs and cats can have crowns, root canals, and even braces - yes, it's absolutely true. But you don't want dental issues to get to the point where you need these treatments, so...
many dentists recommend you brush your dog or cat's teeth - twice a day if you can manage it
cats can only move their jaws up or down, not side to side, which means that there are no chew toys for cleaning their teeth. Cats should always have their teeth cleaned by a professional.
human toothpaste is not good for cats and dogs - too much flouride and of course, they just swallow the toothpaste without rinsing. Get them a product that's meant specifically for cats or dogs
dental disease has been linked to heart disease in certain forms
some cats have a dental floss fetish - flush the floss after you've finished, don't throw it in an open bin (yes, really. A friend's cat had a foot and a half of dental floss pulled from her stomach - she nearly died).

I have to admit, I do not brush my cats' teeth. Do you brush your dog or cat's teeth?

PS. Anyone got a good Lolcat oneliner for the picture above? I need some inspiration...

In which Dr Khuly expresses her frustration...

2010-01-29T08:41:00-05:00

I'm a huge fan of Dr Patty Khuly. Not only is she a fellow Wharton alum and UPenn Veterinarian (they are called VMDs not DVMs by the way), but she's articulate, talented, and holds nothing back.

I had the pleasure of hanging out with Patty for an hour or so at the NAVC recently and won't ever forget the snippets of conversation I caught between Patty and Betsy Saul (the founding goddess of Petfinder) regarding the topic of eating animals (Patty just happened to throw out into the conversation that she'd be happy to eat dog meat while Betsy, an avowed vegan, was explaining the conundrum of the farmer that rented her fields to keep cows. A rare moment...)

But I digress...

Patty blogged yesterday about her frustration over genetic conditions in purebred dogs. Patty has been writing articles on geneic conditions for the Embrace pet health section. To put it in her own words:

After spending 600 carefully chosen words describing the basic devastations of each genetic disease I profile, I inevitably arrive at a section titled, “Prevention.” Here, I always detail the ways we can mitigate the condition’s overall impact on canine and feline health. And it almost always goes something like this:

“There is no direct mode of prevention for X disease. Consequently, genetic counseling to advance the sterilization of affected animals and their first degree relatives (parents and siblings) is a fundamental approach to limiting the inheritance of the genetic material responsible for this disorder.”

She goes on to point out the obvious...

Indeed, there’s only one way to prevent genetic disease and that’s to use our "superior" human brains to accomplish the obvious: breed it out of them. Which is why I‘ve taken to adding the following brand of statement to my “Prevention” sections:

“Breeders should be counseled to abandon entire breeding lines when a trait this deleterious arises. Moreover, X extreme conformation should be eliminated from breed standards to minimize the inheritance of diseases directly associated with it.”

Much good work has been done by some breed clubs on certain genetic conditions (feel free to add some examples in the comments) Patty has a point - genetic conditions can only be "cured" by selective breeding.

Check out the rest of the article over at Dr Khuly's blog Dolittler...