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 could be summed up in one sentence. Dogs and cats have teeth." Not a lot has changed since then: 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.
http://www.dentalvet.com/vets/basicdentistry/are_you_into_dentistry.htm
2. Periodontal disease is caused by invisible bacterial laden plaque; this gets under the gums and causes inflammation. The body responds by walling it off and breaking down the bone and tissue attachments of the tooth. In short, the bacteria cause inflammation, the body causes bone loss. This plaque is not the same thing as the calculus or dark matter on the tooth. This fact is missed even by really great vets that I know personally. If we as vets go in and just remove the major calculus off for you, it does nothing for your pet's periodontal disease because the periodontal disease is caused by plaque which is different than calculus. We need to remove the plaque and then start preventing it.
http://www.dentalvet.com/vets/periodontics/periodontal_disease.htm
3. Plaque is a bio-film. This is a liquid substrate of symbiotically existing bacteria. These bacteria, when compared to their free living counterparts, are up to 1,500 times more anti-biotic resistant and up to 500,000 times more resistant to antiseptics. This is why the infection caused by plaque has to be dealt with by physically removing the plaque (surgically) and can't be dealt with medically.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dental_plaque
4. Plaque starts to form within 24 hours after a complete cleaning. This is why you and I brush our teeth and floss after we see the dentist. If your pet has not had any extractions we will start home care the day you pick him or her up after the procedure. If they have incisions in their mouths we will have to wait 2 weeks to start the major preventative measures. This puts us two weeks behind the game. If we don't do any home care, your pet will be re-infected in less than 6 months. Will be, not might be. WILL be.
5. Over 90% of dogs and cats under one year of age have some level of gingivitis and plaque build up. This means that nearly all of our patients should really be having their first dental cleaning at one year of age.
6. Many people will say that their pet can't have anesthesia or dental work because they are old or have diseases like diabetes, renal disease, cancer- the list is endless. If your pet is very old or has an ongoing illness it NEEDS to have proper dental care. Yes the anesthesia needs to be performed by a well trained and attentive staff but it is necessary to have a healthy mouth if we are going to manage other chronic diseases or stave off cognitive decline. Remember, your pet's head and mouth are attached to the rest of the body and the disease in the head and mouth affect the rest of the body as well. If we removed the gingiva from your pet's mouth and spread it out on a table it would be about the size of the top of their head. If you came home and your pet had an inflamed and infected wound covering the entire top of their head you would bring them in and ask me to treat it right? Why is it so different in the mouth?
7. Veterinary dentistry is super expensive. It is cost prohibitive to many of my clients and if we are going to do it right we should be doing it at least every year. My family has five pets, 6 if my wife gets to claim me and 8 if we add the kids. If we had to pay for dental care for every one of them at full cost we would be spending, at current prices, at least $1,375.00 in just dental care every year! Here's the tough part; for what we do at Riverside Veterinary Care, we are super economically priced. Other vet clinics doing comparable work in similar areas are charging between $500-600/pet for that level of service. We collectively decided we wanted to increase the number of pets we could help and were willing to get by on a little less income to do so. And it's still really expensive! Pet insurance can help with that. Check out this site and seriously think about getting insurance for your little furry one:
http://trupanion.com/ppc/homepage?gclid=CNrboJzuxbMCFad_QgodEGoA4Q
In summary, oral health is not just important, it is vital to maintaining good overall health. Evidence shows us that if we maintain good oral health your pet will live up to 15% longer. How do you put a price on that?
