» home dental care

The Importance of Home Dental Care

John Simon — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 13:52:16 +0000

Next to great nutrition, the one thing caregivers can do to extend the quality and length of their pet’s life is to provide them with good dental care, both at home and professionally. Regular home dental care is more important for your pet than for yourself. You may wonder why I feel that way. Well if you consider that dogs and cats age roughly 7 times faster than humans and that humans are advised to have their teeth clean every 6 months (even when no tartar is visible) then in order to clean our dog and cat’s teeth proportionately as often we would need to give them a prophylaxis a little over once a month. Of course this is obsurd and impracticle to say the least, so most veterinarians compromise and recommend once a year cleaning. This recommended frequency for a dental prophylaxis equates to cleaning our own teeth once every 14 years . Can you imagine what your hygenist would say if you came in for your once every 14 year teeth cleaning and told her you had not brushed since the last one. Given the above information, you can now understand that, because of the proportionately greater length of time between teeth cleanings, your pet’s need for home dental care is more important than your own.

Understand that tartar is a great breeding ground for bacteria and bacterial toxins. These bacteria and toxins are easily absorbed into you pet’s circulation where they pass, via the blood stream, to the liver, kidney, and heart. Once reaching these vital organs, the toxins produce unseen damage on a regular day after day basis. In the begining no symptoms are noticed but after 5 or 10 years of progressive toxic damage, organ injury reachs the point where the organ can no longer function properly. At first there are only abnormal blood tests with no symptoms but as damage progresses physical symptoms appear. It often appears to care giver that their pet just became sick when, in truth, he or she had been sick for several years.

My point is that daily home dental care is essential in reducing toxic and free radical damage to your pet’s vital organs. If you simply rely on the annual professional dental prophylaxsis to get rid of your pet’s tartar and do nothing in between you will have allowed considerable irreparable damage to occur in the interim.

You response to my above recommendation might be, ”Dr. Simon, that’s all well and good but I don’t have time to struggle with my dog or cat on a daily basis”. My reply is that there are a number of approachs that make daily dental care easy. The one I recommend is that my clients use a product known as “Maxigaurd Oral Gel”. The gel is really a solution of zinc vitamin C which when simply smeared on the upper gums will reduce the build up of tartar, bacteria and their toxins. Once getting use to using it, the process should take no more than 30 seconds. This daily dental hygiene is part of our overall dental program that includes an annual dental cleaning.

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Treatment of Degenerative Kidney Disease of Dogs and Cats

John Simon — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 01:05:13 +0000

It is hard for any owner that loves their dog or cat to become comfortable with the fact that these pets age so much more rapidly than we do. This accelerated aging is even more obvious in the larger breeds of dogs that begin to reach their geriatric years between 8 and 10 years of age. A pet’s kidneys are often the weakest link in the aging process and all to frequently the cause of old age death. Things that pet owners can do to support their pet’s ailing kidneys are as follows:

Feed a high quality, higher fiber, low protein diet prescription diet available from all veterinarians–

or — feed a home made kidney diet by following a receipe that we make availablet to our patients. The diet will decrease the formation of waste protein toxins, discourage obesity and reduce the work load of the kidney.

Encourage your dog or cat to drink more by providing lots of fresh water throughout the day. Doing this will promote proper hydration while at the same time flush the kidney and reduce accumulating protein toxins. Adding Celtic sea salt to the pet’s food will encourgage drinking, provide trace minerals he or she are likely to be deficient in, and alkalinize the animal’s body Checking the pet’s blood pressure is recommended, especially when adding salt to the diet, to help detect hypertension.

Make sure your dog or cat receives a regular dental prophylaxis to reduce oral bacteria which are injurious to the animals kidneys, liver, and heart. Home dental care is probably more important for pets than for humans.

Supplement your dog or cat’s diet with anti-oxidant enzymes, vitamins, minerals, and glandulars to reduce tissue injury by free radicals and to stimulate natural immunity. Omega 3 fatty acids, Coenzyme Q10 and alpha lipoic acid are 3 important supplements that promotes kidney health. Homeopathics that can be placed in the pet’s drinking water are also beneficial. Of course it is better to begin these supplements early on in life before the kidneys have received significant damage and symptoms become apparent. Strategically detoxifying the body with special homotoxicologic and nutritional formulas is an important adjunct to treating kidney disease and most any other disease in the body.

Starting these same supplements after kidney damage or kidney failure have been detected will help conserve the remaining kidney cells but will not restore the cells that have died.

Have your veterinarian perform semi annual blood and urine testing to monitor your dog’s kidney function and to provide an early warning system for the development of other degenerative disease. Recently a new urine test, the ERD micro albuminuria test, has become available. The ERD test requires only a small amount of urine and can detect kidney disease much earlier than blood tests. Any dog or cat over the age of 6 years old should be routinely tested with an ERD test because not only does it detect kidney disease but it is also a screen for inflammatory disease of many other organs.

Recent scientific literature out of Europe has shown Infrared laser therapy to provide beneficial effects in both kidney and liver disease.

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Woodside Animal Clinic is a unique, very personal, one doctor practice where, for over 35 years, Dr. Simon has been healing dogs, cats, birds, rabbits, rodents, and reptiles with both conventional and alternative medicine. Dr. Simon is the author of 4 pet care books and he writes a monthly pet care column in the Mirror newspaper.

Woodside Animal Clinic sees pets from all over the greater Detroit Michigan area including Royal Oak, Berkley, Huntington Woods, Ferndale, Pleasant Ridge, Detroit, Hazel Park, Madison Heights, Warren, Centerline, Clawson, Troy, Sterling Heights, Southfield, Birmingham, Bingham Farms, Franklin, Farmington, Farmington Hills, Novi, Wixom, Brighton, Livonia, Plymouth, Commerce, Ann Arbor, Ortonville, Waterford, Union Lake, Rochester, Rochester Hills, Auburn Hills, Utica, Romeo, Windsor, and Toledo.

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A Dental Hygiene Strategy

John Simon — Sat, 19 Apr 2008 20:24:11 +0000

For years I have emphasized to my clients the importance of providing their pets with yearly professional dental cleanings. I continue to tell them that next to superior nutrition dental hygiene is the one most important thing they can do to insure their pets enjoy a long and healthy life. Unfortunately, in spite of the emphasis I have placed on the yearly professional teeth cleaning, many pet owners have chosen not to have this important procedure performed. The most common reason pet owners give for not having their pets teeth cleaned is their fear of the anesthesia. Although anesthesia is a legitimate concern it is quite rare that problems arise when healthy pets have their teeth cleaned, especially if their blood screen, urinalysis, and electrocardiogram are normal. It is very important for pet owners to understand that the much greater danger their pet faces comes from not having his or her teeth cleaned yearly. This is because the tartar that forms on the teeth causes gum recession and breeds bacteria that produce toxins that are absorbed into the blood stream where they can cause liver, kidney and heart damage. This damage takes place slowly, in progressive steps which produce no outward signs at first, but then, as the damage adds up, symptoms become noticeable and organ failure is likely to occur. If a dog or cat finally develops outward signs of kidney disease at the age of 10, the problem may not be the inevitable result of aging but rather caused by a preventable disease that could have been avoided by providing the pet with yearly dental cleanings and home dental care.

In spite of pet owners understanding the serious long term dangers of oral hygiene neglect, the more immediate anesthetic fears appear to take priority and overshadow the more likely to occur dangers that do not have to be faced for years. Because so many pets are deprived the benefits of a yearly teeth cleaning as a result of anesthetic concerns, I have felt compelled to devise an alternative dental strategy to minimize anesthetic fears and encourage more people to have their pets teeth cleaned. This strategy is as follows: For those pet owners that can not bring themselves to have their pets anesthetized I am offering a mini-prophylaxis that will be performed under sedation rather than light anesthetic. Because the pet will be drugged but not totally asleep there are very definite limitations as to how thorough a cleaning can be performed. Pet owners that elect this mini-prophylaxis must understand that although it is definitely a compromise it is far better than no teeth cleaning at all.

Following this mini-prophylaxis a program called “pulsed antibiotic therapy” must be followed to extend the benefits of the cleaning. A Pulsed antibiotic therapy program provides the pet with antibiotics one week of every month and thereby reduces the bacterial population that progressively damages the pet’s gums.

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Woodside Animal Clinic sees pets from all over the greater Detroit area including Royal Oak, Berkley, Huntington Woods, Ferndale, Pleasant Ridge, Detroit, Hazel Park, Madison Heights, Warren, Centerline, Clawson, Troy, Sterling Heights, Southfield, Birmingham, Bingham Farms, Franklin, Farmington, Farmington Hills, Novi, Wixom, Brighton, Livonia, Plymouth, Commerce, Ann Arbor, Ortonville, Waterford, Union Lake, Rochester, Rochester Hills, Auburn Hills, Utica, Romeo and Flint..

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