feemandvm

I have a LOT of issues with Banfield practices. I should probably bite my tongue but I'll share them at least once. I interviewed at a Banfield out of school and after one interview I knew immediately that I would rather work at Papa John's pizza then become employed at a Banfield. Everything at banfield is generated toward making money. The reason that they offer the pet packages is because they have determined over the years that the company makes more money doing this then by simply selling services individually. Here are my primary issues: 1. OVER VACCINATION. This is huge at Banfields. They recommend vaccinating indoor only cats for Giardia annually. Banfield also has nationwide standards... so their recommendations are hte same if you live in Alaska or Florida regarding everything from fleas to vaccines. 2. The reason that they don't charge examination fees on pets on their health care plans is because they found that owners are more likely to come in with their pets and then they can do diagnostics and prescribe medications so by writing off the $X examination they are actually generating more revenue. Seriously, if you call corporate they could tell you that animals not on their plan generate $X in diagnostics and animals on thier plans generate $X + Y. Make no mistake, every thing they do is well researched and if htey found a drop in revenue they would immediately ammend that part of the health plan. 3. I heard that Banfield was trying to come up with their own heartworm prevention products. Why? Not because they are superior to what is on the market but because then they will only use those products and won't have to worry about matching PetMedExpress b/c they won't sell it to them. 4. Banfield steals the vet's ability to practice their style of medicine. If I worked at a Banfield I would have to look an owner in the face and tell them that their indoor only cat honestly needed a Giardia vaccine every year even though I would never vaccinate my own cat the way that Banfield recommends. I would be curious to see how many of the vets that work at Banfields vaccinate their animals the "Banfield way". They also offer a "vaccine warranty" on animals on their pet care plans. Most of the major vaccine companies offer this guarantee w/o a wellness plan. Schering-Plough, Ft Dodge and Pfizer all do I believe. So are they simply using the vaccine company's warranty and passing it onto only those owners on their health care plans???? Also... if I have developed a specific treatment that I like that is not routinely offered/carried by Banfield, I have to petition the company to allow me to use it. I seriously could go on and on... this might be one of my biggest soap box issues. One of the best vets that I know works at a Banfield but I could never recommend to a friend that they see her because she may not be able to give her own honest recommendations ot the client.

If he wasn't off of antibiotics for at least 10 days prior to the culture it could be a false negative. Just an FYI depending on what hte culture was done.

Giardia vaccine IMHO is worthless... I'd only ever even consider using it if a pet was having chronic recurrent Giardia infections. As for Lepto + DHPP... some clinics do it for reminder purposes. Letpo is only good for 1 year and DHPP for 3. We just get around it by giving the DHLPP and having the receptionists updating both Lepto and DHPP reminders but some clinics prefer to make it more efficient and just keep them separated.

I'll just give one aspect of your vet's perspective: The money generated from vaccines may be used to subsidize other aspects of the clinic. For example, Most vets are given an "allowance" in order to attend continuing education annually. Money generated by the hospital will allow vets to attend larger national conventions where more comprehensive information and newer research is shared. Some vets/clinics fulfill their CE needs by filling out short quizzes in journals and never make it to a big convention. The advantage... by spending $50 annually on CE per doctor instead of $1000 they can charge less. The disadvantage... they are really cheating themselves of true continuing education and thus their clients/patients IV pumps are used to administer fluids at an appropriate rate to a patient (mls/hour). Without an IV pump you can set an IV to drip at X drops/minute. Teh problem is that as an animal moves, the way the leg is positioned the drops may change. Without an IV pump to regulate this it may go unnoticed and an animal won't receive the fluids desired by the vet. The pumps cost >$1000 and their cost is often not ever recovered. Because it is better medicine, the cost for a product like this must be absorbed by other areas of revenue (i.e. vaccines). On a similar level, a high speed drill for extractions, a ultrasonic scaler, dental radiography, etc. may not pay for themselves but all provide better medicine to teh patient. Some of these costs are also offset by vaccinations, pharmacy, etc.

TBD can cause neck pain in addition to cancer, muscle strain/sprain, pinched nerve, infection, inflammation, etc. When a dog doesn't respond dramatically to cortisone injections, I start to get more worried. Diagnostically you could consider a plain x-ray, bloodwork and a TBD panel. If WNL, next steps are referral to a neruologist and possible CT scan.

Technically Dr. Couto doesn't see patients in the Greyhound clinic... he just "oversees it". From what I understand though he does see most if not all of hte patients that go through the Greyhound clinic... the "offical" doctor listed is someone else though. Dr. Dyce is in orthopedics and you should be able to schedule directly with him for orthopedic issues. He isn't directly affiliated with the Greyhound clinic... but that doesn't matter. He is super Greyhound savvy and a GREYT orthopedist (the best one I know).

Dr. Couto will see the hounds for almost anything... and if it is something that he isn't comfortable with... he'll get the appropriate specialist in for an opinion. You can make an appt. directly with dr. couto, with OSU's Greyhound clinic or if Dr. Dyce is on clinics... I would make an appt. with him. Dr. Jon Dyce is an OUTSTANDING orthopedist and is VERY Greyhound savvy. We are really lucky to have both Dr. Couto and Dr. Dyce at OSU (lucky for those of us in Ohio). If Dr. Dyce was on clinics... I would make an appt. with him, if not then I would make an appt. with either Dr. Couto directly or the Greyhound clinic... whichever I could get into first. Just make sure Dr. Couto is "on clinics" when you make an appt. with the Greyhound clinic.

Happy to hear he is eating and obviously continue to monitor him through therapy. Sky's anroexia worsened with each successive chemo treatment. This won't always happen just that he may need something stronger like Metoclopramide or Prochlorperazine if he gets anorexia while on Pepcid.

With the old Filarabits... giving them to a HW positive dog was a mistake you only made once. With the newer monthly preventitive products... reactions are quite rare but more likely with Interceptor and Sentinel than in Heartgard or Revolution. I would actually argue that if an owner wasn't going to treat that they should keep their dog on Heartgard for 2 reasons. 1. Eventually the heartgard will "slow kill" the heartworms. Not before significant damage to the heart was done but if they aren't going to treat anyway late is better than never. 2. If you give them prevention then the dog won't be a source of microfilaria for mosquitos to bite and then infect other dogs in teh area. So hte answer is can today's preventitives be problematic in a HW positive dog? Yes they can... but it isn't nearly the risk that it was when we used to use daily filarabits.

This really isn't an argument for neutering... just something that has always bothered me about owning an intact male not used for breeding. We know that animals undergo "puberty" and have hormonal influences that cause them to want to reproduce. We also know that males can "smell" a female in heat for long distances. So.... isn't owning an intact male and not permitting him to reproduce kind of like telling your son that he is not in anyway for the rest of his life allowed to act on any sexual urges? Just to make the situation similar the son would have to also be able to know if there was a female that was "in heat" anywhere within a 2 mile radius. I can generally tell if a male dog is intact before I ever do an actual exam based on their "attitude" in the room. Sometimes I'm wrong but I very rarely miss an intact animal. One of the things I've noticed is that most males seem to be more stressed (this is also one of the reasons they seem to have a lower risk of obesity, more nervous energy). Knowing that they are having all of these sexual urges but are either unable to act on them or are punished when they do without understanding why, is it any wonder that they are more stressed? Again, this isn't so much an argument for neutering as I try to keep it to the medical facts... this is something that just on surface value seemed to bother me about keeping a male intact.

I've read it before and this is either someone who has never read the research, doesn't understand the research or worse is deliberately misrepresenting the research. The author clearly has her own agenda as she is selectively stealing facts from various papers that fit her "cause" while ignoring the facts that don't. None of her "exhaustive research" has actually researched anything. The papers referenced were all retrospective (see my previous post on why this research is worth nothing more than prompting REAL research). Many of the papers do not actually support keeping an animal intact as the author misrepresents them as doing so. For example (I'll use the osteosarcoma paper b/c that is the one I most commonly see abused): The author of this paper states that you should keep an animal intact b/c they run a higher risk of osteosarcoma when they are neutered. What the author fails to tell you was the final conclusion of hte paper was that the intact male dogs did not live any longer than neutered male dogs and that the intact female dogs actually died 2 years earlier than spayed females. In many of hte other articles referenced by the author some of the higher "risk" was not found to be statistically significantly and thus was within a range that could be random chance (if you flip a coin 4 times you won't always get 2 heads and 2 tails). This fact is also not mentioned by the author. When a dog does eventually develop a problem such as testicular cancer, pyometra, prostatitis, etc. In order to resolve this problem, guess what one of the treatments is.... NEUTER! However, instead of neutering a healthy young animal, we are now neutering an older less healthy animal that has cancer or a nasty infection, etc. A neuter is w/o question harder on an older animal than a younger animal. So in the end you've still neutered your pet... you've just put them through a harder neuter. Or in the case of a prostate or uterine infection, they've gone through the neuter but now have to try to deal with an infection b/c they weren't already neutered. When you have to misrepresent research to try to argue for a cause... that pretty much tells me that there isn't a real argument for it. Again, I don't even raise any of the "too many puppies" argument which is another issue or hte fact that no internal medicine specialists or cancer specialists actually support or believe the data that was presented in the review article. Anyone who works with statistics and research knows that you can make them say anything and this is a good example of that fact. I guess I should add that we just rescued a 9 year old female that had been used for breeding. I spayed her on Monday and removed 2 mammary tumors. Both were benign but the larger of the two had some "pre-malignant" changes. The "joys of motherhood" in the doggy world means the joys of mammary cancer for a good percentage of them. Had we rescued an intact male I would have pursued a neuter just the same as a spay.

Acepromazine is a sedative and is contradindicated in fearful situations. Imagine something that is very scary to you... spiders, snakes, whatever it may be. Now I am going to put you in a room full of X and drug you so that you are too tired to move. That is how Ace works. It just sedates the dog... it does nothing to address their actual fear. It used to be used for storms all the time but that was before we knew better. Avoid Ace if at all possible for fearful events. Prozac, Clomicalm, Elavil, Xanax, etc. are all reasonable options if behavioral modification is ineffective. DAP collars are another option that are very benign. I haven't had good luck with things like Rescue Remedy although others love it.

The osteosarcoma study is one that is commonly misrepresented on message boards. There are a LOT of problems with it. 1. It is a "retrospective study". This means that they pulled out charts or sent out questionaires to owners... no "new research" actually took place. The conclusions made by this type of research can often be flawed for MANY reasons. Here are some examples of flawed conclusions: "It is a known fact that as ice cream sales increase that crime increases" (I am being serious, it does happen). I therefore conclude that ice cream causes crime. Problem: ice cream sales increase when it is warmer outside and crime increases when it is warmer outside! Although my italicized comment is true, my conclusion is false. "100% of cocaine users drank milk at some point in their lives prior to using cocaine". I therefore conclude that milk is a gateway drug that leads to drug abuse. Problem: 100% of non-cocaine users ALSO drank milk. I think there is a good chance my italicized comment is true, although my conclusion is false. Obviously these 2 examples are silly but they are just meant to show you how someone can manipulate or misinterpret data to show anything that you want. You can read these and know they are silly, but insert medical conditions/terminology in for crime and ice cream and now it may not be so obviously silly. 2. We know that neutered animals are much more likely to receive higher levels of health care than intact animals on average. I can tell you from private practice that this is a fact. We've all seen pictures of dogs that are tied out back with a ripped open bag of dog food that are mistreated. Those dogs are very often intact unless the owner received the animal already neutered. Again this doesn't imply in anyway that every intact animal is treated this way but aniamls that are treated this way are often intact. So... poor Fido that is intact, tied outside and ignored is owned by Mr. Dir T. Bag. Fido develops osteosarcoma or prostate cancer or whatever other ailment you would like to study. What are the odds that Mr. Bag will actually take Fido to the veterinarian for a definitive diagnosis? The answer is 0.000001%. The point is that incidence of disease in intact animals in most annecdotal or restrospective research is severely underdiagnosed b/c a large percentage of the sick intact dogs never make it to the vet. 3. Another thought on the osteosarcoma study... it concluded that earlier castration triggered a "higher rate of osteo". Greyhounds have one of if not the highest rate of osteosarcoma of any breed. How many Greyhounds are neutered before 6 months of age like many other breeds of dog? I find it interesting that the breed with the highest risk of osteo on average gets neutered later in life than any other breed. 4. We do know that neutering is a risk for weight gain (I don't think this is a bad thing because one of the reasons for this is that they lose a lot of 'nervous' energy). When fed appropriately this isn't an issue. However, many neutered (and some intact) aimals are significantly overweight. We know that fat is pro-inflammatory and a risk factor for cancer. Therefore some of the studies that may show an increased risk for cancer in neutered animals may be true but may not be caused by neutering but in fact caused by being obese. Therefore having a neutered animal kept at a healthy weight would give you a healthier animal than an intact animal. Again one of the flaws with "retrospective research" is that it doesn't account for any of these "factors". 5. Here is a fun tidbit from the Rottie osteosarcoma paper that failed to get printed in this paper: the "age of death" of intact and neutered male Rottweilers was the same and the "age of death" of intact females was 2 years YOUNGER than spayed females. So this author uses the reference as an argument for keeping your animal intact when the paper clearly shows no increase in life from keeping the male dog intact and actually a VERY clear shortening of life for keeping the female intact. Funny how this fact is never actually referenced!!! 6. It is a known fact that the type of dog most commonly surrenedered for behavioral problems, most likely to bite, most likely to be hit by a car, etc. is an intact male dog. The end conclusion is... NEUTER! There are really no health benefits to keeping the testicles and plenty of them to neuter (prostatic disease, perianal adenomas, testicular cancer, etc.). One common error is that neutering reduces hte risk of prostate cancer. That is not true. Neutering is NOT protective against prostate cancer.

Be sure to consider bloodwork to evaluate kidney function, etc.

This would be an amelanotic melanoma... meaning it doesn't contain black pigment. These occur but are somewhat less common. Some melanomas in dogs can be benign... but malignant melanoma is a REALLY big deal as it is a BAD tumor. If your hound is ever diagnosed with malignant melanoma... you need to get to a veterinary oncologist to discuss the melanoma vaccine.

http://www.anipryl.com/ I really like the drug if cognitive dysfunction is present. Fatty acid supplementation can also help in some situations. We don't carry it routinely but oddly enough I've had better luck with Nutramaxx's fatty acid (welactin) than other companies for cognitive dysfunction: http://www.nutramaxlabs.com/products/anima...ness_welac.asp#

How was teh stroke diagnosed. A true stroke can occur in dogs or cats but are not as common as in humans. Is she close to a veterinary teaching hospital where she could see a specialist?

This was the patent application used for Vetmedin... what I can't tell is that under results it seems to imply that asymptomatic animals did benefit from the use of Vetmedin... however, no reference was sited that I could tell. I'm looking into this some more to see if I can make mroe sense out of it.

The vaccine maintains very good efficacy for 6 months and tapers off over the next 6 months. So... if your pup boards every November and you get the vaccine in August... a "1 year" is sufficient. I also prefer intranasal to the injectable as you are providing more local immunity at the site of infection and it seems to be less reactive. Bordatella vaccine is "optional" and only for "at risk" dogs and vaccination cannot completely guarantee that the animal cannot contract kennel cough.

You don't want to give Deramaxx with Rimadyl... you may just be adding hte pain of a stomach ulcer on top of everything else. There are plenty of other options such as Tramadol, Fentanyl, etc. that coudl be beneficial. Having said that the pain of bone cancer is not one that we can realistically control well no matter what combination of medications we use. : (

http://www.freepatentsonline.com/20070112010.html This is the only information I could find. I'm trying to dig up a more user friendly version... will try to post later.

You could try adding Tramadol to the Rimadyl to see if that helps. You could also try Adequan injections. You could also see an orthopedic specialist to see if any surgical options exist or visit a specialist for acupuncture. I didn't know that generic metacam was on the $4 program... good to know!

Look for corns and have the vet do an exam for signs of pain in hte back leg. If it is true "weakness" (thta would be unusual) then you could consider an anabolic steroid like Winstrol.

Happy to hear things seemed to have worked out OK. Just remember that for all the knowledge you can gain from GT... it is NOT a replacement for going to the E-Vet in an emergency. I saw you posted previously about "I'd rather have the disc scratch up the throat than get stuck in the intestetines" or words to that effect. That is a dangerous train of thought. If the disc were to get caught in teh throat... removing an esophageal foreign body is a MUCH MUCH MUCH more dangerous surgery than removing an intestinal or stomach foreign body. If you are lucky and your primary vet or the E-vet has endoscopy then it may be less invassive... if not it could require thoracic surgery which is a really big deal! MUCH more serious than an abdominal surgery. If the situation is serious enough that you need to ask "Should I go to the emergency clinic?" then the answer is 9/10 times YES. Could some of those situations have waited and not required an ER trip? Sure... but it only takes 1 time that an owner should have gone to the ER but didn't to learn that lesson the hard way. If you go to the ER clinic and it wasn't absolutely necessary... then you are out the ER fee but know that your hound is OK.

Dasaquin would be available through your vet. It comes as straight Dasaquin and Dasaquin + MSM.