Protecting Your Puppy from Parvovirus
Back Pain in Dogs: Its Serious
The Case of Buxley
Dr. Google, Paging Dr. Google
Many pet owners love to consult Dr. Google, says Tufts veterinarian Alicia Karas, DVM, facetiously. Not that she doesnt understand the allure.
Its tempting, she comments, right there at your fingertips. Its free, she adds. And it seems spot on. My dog is limping - how can I get her through this without a visit to the vet? Ah, heres the answer.
The problem, Dr. Karas says, is that not even the best pet-related sites on the Internet can walk you through how to take care of your own particular dog with his own particular circumstances. There are just too many variables. The issue gets particularly serious when it comes to dispensing drugs.
Your Dog May Not Be Getting Enough Vitamin D
Decreased Immunity in Older Dogs
One of the most common questions people ask veterinarians as their dog gets older is whether she still needs her vaccinations. In fact, a lot of people with dogs skip the vaccinations in later years, figuring that their pet has already been vaccinated against various illnesses a number of times and has gotten sick to that point, so why put the animal through more shots? It's a grave mistake. Older dogs need their shots even more than when they were young and middle-aged. The immune system, like other body systems, slows down in old age, making a dog more susceptible not only to diseases such as cancer but also to infections. She simply cannot mount a sufficient immune response to illnesses she might have been able to ward off in her younger days.
Feeding Your Healthy, Older Dog
Investigating Nighttime Panic in dogs
Eleven-year-old Tate, a German shepherd, has started to have anxiety attacks, usually at night, says her owner Sharon Nevins of Berne, New York. When they occur she pants, shakes, and is unable to settle down. It happened twice last winter and then three times in November. It takes three to four hours before they pass. Tate has been seen by her vet, who performed...
They Cant Give You Their Pain Score on a Scale from 1 to 10
When it comes to letting you know about pain, dogs are a piece of cake compared to cats, says Alicia Karas, DVM, Director of the Pain Consultation & Referral Service at Tufts Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine. Cats are secretive by nature, she says, and will not disclose everything from I just dragged in a mouse from the street …
Seeking a Pain Specialist
If the Cancer Surgeon Got Clean Margins, Why Did the Tumor Grow Back?
You sit anxiously in the waiting room while your dog undergoes surgery to remove a cancerous mass. Finally, after what seems like forever, the doctor comes out in his scrubs and tells you he was able to excise the malignant tumor and that he believes he got it all. Relieved but not yet out of the woods, you wait for the pathology report. Sure enough, it confirms the surgeons belief that he excised the cancer in its entirety. There are clean margins.
Why, then, does the tumor grow back in the exact same spot some months later?
Says soft tissue veterinary surgeon John Berg, DVM, who operates on cancerous tumors …
On the Horizon: The Ability to Detect Even a Single Cancer Cell During Surgery...
When removing a malignant tumor, a surgeon can't see a single cancer cell left behind with the naked eye — or even 10,000 cancer cells. That's a microscopic amount, which is why excised tumors currently get sent to pathologists. They can look at a few small sections of an excised tumor under the microscope and get an idea of whether the cancer was removed in its entirety. But what if a way were developed that allowed cancer surgeons to see right in the operating room, before the patient was closed back up, whether any cancer cells remained?
Your Dog editor-in-chief John Berg, DVM, is involved in cutting-edge research that will allow surgeons to do just that. In an investigation he conducted with fellow scientists at…