Most of the time a follow-up appointment is required. If I'm doing an exam and, say, I find that your cat has periodontal disease or maybe even a fractured tooth, it's very rare that I'm able to proceed and go and put the cat under general anesthetic and perform the procedure right then and there on the spot. We need to prepare, we need to have the animal fasted, we might want to run blood work before, those kinds of things. So typically we diagnose on the first visit and then have them come back for treatment on a later visit.

X-rays help us to better diagnose what's going on, not only in the mouth but, more importantly, under the gums where we can't see. For example, you might have a diseased tooth that looks like there's some tartar on the outside but the crown looks pretty solid and the tooth is not loose, but you do an x-ray and maybe you uncover that one of those roots has a tremendous amount of bone loss around it. Well, that tooth at that point is usually not a viable tooth so it would need to be extracted. Without x-rays, you would never have a way to know that.