Preventative care is critical to have, especially starting with young puppies. When they’re young, the good thing about heartworm prevention is that it treats intestinal parasites as well, which is very common with younger puppies. Then as they get older, it's vital to keep them from getting anything that might worsen other diseases, as well, such as parasites.

Yup that is the goal. Of course, there are always resistant types of fleas. But with our new products, we have seen excellent results, and we haven't had any resistance yet.

We want your dog to be on flea, tick, and heartworm prevention all year round. Now, we do have a few options. We have injectable heartworm medication, which can be given every 12 months, so you don't have to worry about that. With your flea and tick prevention, we have one that's available every three months. Otherwise, we do have the more common monthly prevention for both of those.

So the first thing we do, as with any appointment, is a thorough exam. This is making sure that your dog is healthy enough to be on prevention. Then also, with heartworm prevention, we like to run a heartworm test before we start, just to make sure that we don't have any heartworms present before starting that prevention.

It halts diseases before they start, such as fleas, ticks, and heartworm.

So preventative care is stopping diseases before they start.

They sure could. It depends on what we're looking for and whether the dog is here for a wellness visit versus here for being sick. And often, the question would be, does my pet need to be poked more than once to draw the blood? We can often draw one sample and run many tests off of that, which might alleviate many of the owner's concerns about running multiple tests. We need to run most of our tests with minimal volume compared to their total body volume. So they're not donating blood to us for that type of thing, as it’s not a large amount of it. And then, we can run several different tests if we deem that necessary, but we'll take it step by step and, depending on what the first lab test shows, that may give us an answer, or we may need to run other tests.

If we find something that's abnormal, we will want to follow up with that. These lab tests are one moment in time, and so it might be a very short-term elevation or abnormality. And so we want to know in two weeks, or four weeks, what's going on with that value. Did it go back to normal, and we don't need to worry about it, or is it going up further, and we need to investigate the underlying cause? If we're treating something, we want to follow up—that would be another reason to see if that's working and what we need to do from there.