iPets Ally Q&A Round-up
What are the best ways to get your dogs to take pills or medicine?
Suppose that your dog needs to take medication but is rejecting it, vets would definitely recommend to try wrapping the pills in treats.
At any rate, there’s a couple of things you can use; if you’re vegetarian, liverwurst is not going to top your list but that’s a fail – safe even though it’s sort of a nasty non – food it tends to work really well. The other thing you could use is just a small amount of CrockPet diet just enough to hide the pill and the best way to kind of do this is to give a treat with nothing in it, give a second one with the supplement in it and then give a third one with nothing in it so that they just keep chowing and never get the chance to spit things out.
Bananas, as well as peanut butter is a good one or another nut butter with peanut butter, but you do need to make sure that it does not have xylitol in it. Crunchy seems to be a good choice because the texture gets them convinced that there’s nothing else in there but the downside of that is that it tends to be sticky so sometimes if they don’t get it down in one go, they can lick the pill back out. Now, another option would be something like watermelon or cantaloupe that you can kind of squish the pill into and just hand it to them and boom down the hatch it goes. I hope that is helpful.
What is the best thing to do to help treat a recurring mast cell cancer?
Assuming that your dog’s going to need surgery again probably because of a benign cancer that’s in a place that’s really irritating and so you see some discharge and things like that and what is very worrisome is that his submandibular lymph nodes are swollen as well as the ones on the back of the legs which are called the popliteal lymph nodes and his liver enzymes are up.
I think you absolutely need to go ahead and aspirate those lymph nodes. Ideally, you might as well go ahead and get chest films done to make sure that there’s no evidence of the mediastinal lymph nodes being increased in size and then preferably, the abdominal area should have an ultrasound to see if there’s any evidence of spread into the spleen or the liver, especially with those liver enzymes being elevated. Now, if he’s also having bladder control issues and he’s just dumping a ton of fluid, I would also get a urinalysis checked to make sure there’s no occult infection going on. The other thing that could be there as well is lymphoma. And, unfortunately, mast cell cancer has a tendency to recur.
Does previcox, tramadol, and gabapentin have long – term side effects?
Suppose your dog has been very nauseous because of all of the medications and was originally on gabapentin but you went on previcox which made its pain and stomach seem better on previcox and gabapentin.
Now, your concerned about long – term side effects and wants to avoid those damages. As far as previcox, it’s non – steroidal and it may have a long – term side effects. So, if it’s previcox then what I would suggest doing is see if you can titrate the dose down. So, for instance, if you’re to give a whole pill every day, you might try a pill every other day or you might try 3 quarters of a pill once a day, you’re just going to have to play with it.
On a personal note, we’re playing the same game with Mona so she is 16, she has pretty significant arthritis unfortunately, it’s because one of our larger dogs grabbed her neck so she’s got some neck arthritis and so we use gabapentin every now sadly, it seems to really sedate her as well as the tramadol. So, we’re doing the laser acupuncture, we’re doing some Chinese herbs, we’re doing several things but it’s just not enough and so for her, meloxicam is the thing we need and the way we use it for her is she’s 9 pounds at a good weight, what I’m able to do is to give the 7 pound dose every other day and so far that’s been okay.
Having said all of that’s, see how it is with tramadol. One strategy would be to use previcox one day, tramadol the next. You can use all 3 of them together. So, if you use previcox one day, tramadol the next, and gabapentin every day, that’s okay, it’s safe. The biggest issue you’re going to face is just really over the top sedation. Now, if you feel the gabapentin is really upsetting their stomach then don’t use it but see what happens when you pull it out. The other thing with gabapentin too is typically the veterinarians want to use massive doses like for a large sized dog, something like a 300 milligrams which I find is just tremendously sedating and so a 100 milligrams may be adequate twice a day or maybe 50 milligrams twice a day is adequate so this is where you want to really kind of feel your way through and figure out what’s what.
So, that’s what I have for you this week. If you did not know, finally we have a calcium citrate product, we should be able to have on a consistent basis and it’s a kilo of calcium citrate and so we’ve got it up on the store, we’ve got it by itself. I think it’s 20 bucks and then we’ve also created a CrockPet refill kit which will give you I think 10% off of all three items. So, it’s a 32-ounce coconut oil and all good stuff. Having said all of that, I finally have found an alternative way to get a third-party fulfiller so if there are products you would really like for us to carry on a consistent basis, just let me know and we will add them to the store. We’ve got a little work to do in the store unfortunately but that seems to be the case with any of these websites. Now, if you’re not a Facebook user, you can reach out to Hanna at drruthruberts.com and she will get your questions added to the weekly list. I will see you all next Monday, take care and have a great week. Give everybody a big hug and kiss for me.
