Our local veterinarian Heath McNutt, whose blog, ‘Vet’s View’, has built up a veritable reference guide on pet health over the years,
Warning: Heath has been to more dental continuing education!
This will be my 12th blog about dentistry in veterinary medicine. Caution: run on sentence ahead. There is so much that I want to illustrate for you and teach you about what goes on in your pet’s mouth and what you and I can do about it together that I could and just might spend the rest of my life writing and talking about it. What I am going to do today is break down the top 7 reasons people aren’t aware of how big a deal this really is. I will try to provide external third party links where applicable.
1. Veterinary schools do little or often nothing to prepare veterinarians for dentistry. Today during a lecture a board certified veterinary dentist stood in front of a group of veterinarians, technicians and practice managers and said, “When I graduated veterinary school my dentistry education can be summed up in one sentence. Dogs and cats have teeth.” Not a lot has changed since then, this means that the majority of veterinarians out there don’t know how to recognize and treat many dental problems. Unless your vet has had extensive training in dentistry after graduation they might be missing the early more easily treated stages of periodontal disease.
For the full post, visit Heath at his blog here.
Heath McNutt is a veterinarian at Riverside Veterinary Care in Rutland and Ludlow, Vermont.
