Your Pet's Dental Care

Want to give your pet a longer life? How about a life with less pain, and lower chances of diabetes, liver or kidney problems, or heart disease? It’s easier than you think – we just need to cure your pet’s periodontal disease.

Between 70 and 80% of all pets over age three have some degree of periodontal disease. You can see this begin as tartar accumulation, or the brownish-grey gunk that accumulates on your pet’s teeth. As the infection creeps up under your pet’s gums, the gums become reddened and swollen. Eventually they try to escape the infection by receding, thus exposing your pet’s tooth roots. If untreated, the infection penetrates the bone of the tooth socket, loosening the teeth and letting bacteria roam into the bloodstream.

Here’s the bottom line — if untreated, periodontal disease can take more than 15% off your pet’s life!! That can be a year or more.

What happens during a dental procedure at Cambria Veterinary Clinic? After a pre-anesthetic physical examination, we’ll begin by anesthetizing your pet, using only the very safest and most modern drugs. We monitor every anesthetized pet with a continuous EKG, blood pressure and pulse oximetry– the same monitoring used in human hospitals.

First, we’ll take digital radiographs (x-rays) of every single tooth in your pet’s mouth. This is ESSENTIAL in evaluating tooth vitality and ANY disease below the gumline (Fun fact: approximately 75% of pet dental disease is BELOW the gumline.) Next we’ll perform a thorough examination of your pet’s mouth, charting the teeth and probing the periodontal pockets. We clean and polish every tooth in your pet’s mouth using the very same ultrasonic scaler used by your dentist.

While we hope that we do not have to extract any teeth, sometimes that is the only way to cure your pet’s pain and infection. We always use local anesthetics and systemic pain control medications to ensure your pet’s comfort.

Whatever we can do to keep your pet safe and comfortable, we will. That is our promise to you.

Here’s what you can expect from a dental procedure at Cambria Veterinary Clinic.

This includes:

• Examination
• Anesthesia
• RADIOGRAPHS OF EVERY TOOTH IN THE MOUTH
• Dental scaling and polishing
• Oral exam and charting by veterinarian
• Fluid Support
• Antibiotic injection
• Pedicure
• Anal gland expression

All of the above is why we don’t like the term ‘dental’ but more accurately a “Complete Oral Health Assessment and Treatment (COHAT)” plan. By having your pet’s teeth treated, cleaned and evaluated at CVC, we can be 100% confident we are identifying all oral disease and treating as indicated based on your pet’s mouth.

I wish it worked, but it doesn’t. Anesthesia-free dental cleaning may give your pet a “whiter smile”, but it’s just physically impossible to solve problems under the gum line– which is where over 75% of dental problems exist– without anesthesia. Unfortunately, the removal of visible tartar from your pet’s teeth does NOTHING to treat infection or pain. Radiographs are not possible. The extraction of painful or diseased teeth is not possible. And I’m sure that your pet thoroughly enjoys being restrained while somebody pokes at their sore gums with metal instruments. Heck, you and I don’t enjoy it even though we understand it– and your pet certainly doesn’t understand why they’re being treated like this.

We use anesthesia for our patients, because only with anesthesia can we SOLVE your pet’s oral health issues WITHOUT DISCOMFORT. When you watch them walk out the door with their tails wagging, you’ll know you made the right decision for your pet.

It is just about impossible to practice veterinary dentistry without dental radiographs. They are the most vital tool in veterinary dentistry, because they are essential in most cases to make an accurate diagnosis. The diagnosis is the basis for understanding the prognosis and in deciding how to treat our patients. 

The thing for you to remember is that 2/3 of each tooth in a pet is under the gum line and thus invisible without dental films. 

Studies have shown that without dental radiographs, significant pathology is missed in up to 75% of pets. Dental radiology replaces a guess with a diagnosis and enables us to solve your pet’s oral pain. We are proud to offer full mouth digital dental radiographs with every pet dental procedure.