Speaker 1: You're listening to Petlifradio dot com.
Speaker 2: Welcome, Welcome, Welcome, and you are listening to ask the
Bets with doctor Jeff here on pet Life Radio, the
only live call in show on pet Life Radio. So
I want to hear from you. And I'm your host,
Doctor Jeff, who over here with you for the next
thirty minutes hoping to help you with your pets, whether
it's a behavior question, a medical problem, or just to chat.
As a matter of fact. You know, one of the
things I've noticed, I've gotten some emails and the comments
on emails that we listen to your show every week,
and that's great, but I want to hear from you,
even if you want to call in a just comment
on something, on anything, because that's why we're here. We're
here to talk to you. I get bored listening to myself.
And I just came back from the Central Vennor Night Conference.
It was in Washington, actually in Maryland. It was called
National Harbor at this magnificent resort called the Gaylord, and
it was a great, great conference and I went in
and I was speaking. I actually flew in on Wednesday,
late afternoon. I was rushed straight to the local CBS affiliate.
We did a segment on helping your dogs beat the
heat during the summer months. And boy is getting hot,
and it's getting hot here, I mean here in La
today it's been by me in the West LA area,
it's been in the nineties. It's been in the eighties
at the beach, and usually the beach is cooler. The
valleys it's been over one hundred, so it's been very hot.
And then I spoke all day, well not all day,
all afternoon, for about six hours on Thursday. And I
tell my audience when I'm speaking, I said, I don't
want to just hear from me. I actually I have
a handheld mic, and I love when those my audience
pop up give me their two cents on whatever subject,
or talking about things that might work in their hospitals,
things that haven't worked in their hospitals that I say
should work in their hospitals. We try to figure out why,
and I say, it's so much better to have a
dialogue than a monologue. So for all of you out
there that have access to a phone, give us a
call at eight seven seven three eight five eight eight
A two, or if you have access to your computers,
join us online. Pet Life Radio, click on Ask the
Vets with Doctor Jeff and you can go to the
join in on the conversation right where it says invite
friends and down at the bottom of that long boxes
click here to join the conversation. Go ahead and click
and finally you can just send us a quick text
or a quick email to Dr Jeff Doctor Jeff at
Petlife radio dot com. Very easy, and we'd love to
hear from you, And of course I'm here for you,
but I'm also here thanks to our sponsors like cong
veterinary products like pro Sense Pet Products and of course
pro Senses, major retail partners like Walmart, who have a
full supply a full selection of the pro Sense products
basically pro Sense or products that I've co developed, and
we are trying to bring to the mass market products
as good as you can otherwise find it your veterinarian,
but of course more affordable because we think all of
you should be treating your pets with the best that
you can afford, and the pro Sense products are fantastic.
So anyway, again, give us a call eight seven seven
three eight five eighty eight eight two. I want to
hear from you. And you know one of the things
that you know, a great dog was hit by car.
I get a call from a client of mine and
she wants to know if we could help her. She
has a friend whose dog was taken to the emergency facility.
Apparently both front legs broken. Turned out fortunately not to
be the case, just one front leg broken. At this
very very advanced emergency facility, which is probably one of
the best in town. There are two great ones, this
is one of them. It was just very costly. She
could not afford the treatment. So my client calls me,
wondered if I can help them with his dog. So
arranged to have the dog transferred. So one of the
things that this emergency evatility wanted to do, which did
bother me a little bit, is that they did want
to do surgery on the legs immediately, actually putting pressure
on the owners that they had to make a decision
fast about fixing the front legs. Notice legs plural. So
I tell my client on the phone, I say, you know,
first of all, there's really no such thing as an
emergency broken bone.
Speaker 1: As a matter of fact.
Speaker 2: As a matter of fact, that when you have a
dog that has undergone trauma, trauma serious enough to actually
break bones. There is a very strong likelihood that if
this trauma was strong enough to break a bone, it
was also strong enough to ruin or damage some soft tissue.
And we always in an emergency trauma situation like this
is we are not rushing to fix broken bones. That's
the last thing on your list. The skin cuts the
last thing on your list. The first thing you need
to worry about. What's going on inside? The abdomen was
a spleen ruptured with the same impact. How about the lungs?
Do you have any lunk in Tusians? Do we have
what we call a pneumo thorax where the lungs were
damaged filling the chest cavity with air, thus not giving
any room for the lungs to expand with breathing. How
about a bladder? Do we possibly have a ruptured bladder?
Dogs or cats that have a bad fall, the impact
of that it's like a water balloon popping. You drop
a water balloon, even a fairly thick one, from a height,
and as soon as that impact of that balloon hits
the ground, it's gonna shatter. And that's what happens to
a bladder sometimes, so I was a bit uneasy, even
though I was on my trip, to have them just
go ahead and proceed with fixing broken bones when they
haven't really even evaluated the full extent of potential internal injury.
So sure enough, the dog gets transferred. Dog super Table
has a raund bow front legs. We review the X rays,
turn its bruised, it's cut, but it wasn't a break.
The bones were fine. The other one definitely needed surgery,
but certainly not enough. So we're monitoring this dog for
overnight to see how we're doing the next Actually, what
you would expect from a dog who is being hospitalized
on fluids, you would expect that the parameters that this
dog's attitude, this dog's demeanor, assuming no internal injury, would
be better in the next twenty four hours, in the
first twenty four hours, because they get better all the time.
They should be anyway. Yet, in fact, this dog was
getting worse. So we evaluated what we call the PCV
the taxell volume, and that was dropping, meaning there was
some bleeding going on here. And on an ultra sound
of the abdomen. Though there were no huge pockets of fluid,
you can see some and when we put a needle
into one of these pockets. We found a clearish, maybe
a little bloodish fluid that smelt awfully like urine. Wow,
so we're thinking, maybe this dog is a rupture bladder.
So we go ahead and we inject some dye into
the urethra, and we follow this dye into the bladder,
and sure enough, this bladder has a hole, a rupture,
and this dog is leaking your into his abdomen. That
is really not good. So sure enough, the surgery that
was supposed to be a surgery to put a plate
or to mend the broken bone turns out to be
an abdominal surgery to explore the belly, make sure everything
else was okay, check the spleen, check the liver, check
the stomach, and to repair the hole in the bladder,
which was done, kept the dog on a urinary catheter
throughout the weekend, and came back on Monday and fixed
the broken bone, and that dog, happily said, is doing
just great. So for those of you out there whose
dogs are cats, are involved in a trauma, the last
thing you want to worry about are the bones and
the skin. Those things can be repaired almost anytime. As
a matter of fact, the surgeons say with a broken
bone you have minimum minimum five day window and you
can go longer. It just means that it might be
a little more difficult to achieve the reduction you want.
You could still do it, but it'll be more difficult
because the muscles start to contract sometimes just start getting
maybe even some healing, some scar tissue coming in, so
you have to break that up before you try to
realign the bones in their proper position.
Speaker 3: But it's not impossible.
Speaker 2: But what you don't want to do is rush into
surgery to repair anything on the outside, including extremities, until
you're sure that there's no damage or anything going on
on the inside. So anyway, that's all so you know,
when you have these animals and they're hitting, you rush
them to the emergency center. Don't let the doctors talk
you in to hasten you into fixing things that could
wait when you want to really concentrate on some of
the things that can't wait or things that you need
to worry about first and again, most notably, those injuries
are going to be lung related, are going to be
abdomen related, soft tissue related inside the abdomen, whether it's
plain whether it's liver, whether it's stomach, whether it's bladder,
that's a concern. And the same thing with bite wounds.
You know a lot of times you can have a
bad bite into and you see punctures into the stomach
and I should say into the abdomen of a dog,
and you see the puncture through the skin. You really
have to make sure that that puncture didn't go deep
enough to go into say a loop of bowel, because
you can't see that. So it's very important to keep
that in mind. Now, there are some practices amongst some
of the universities that have advocated that on any abdominal
puncture you are within reason to do an abdominal exploratory
to make sure that the intestine was not punctured as well,
a liver wasn't punctured as well, the spleen wasn't punctured
as well. I personally have my issues with that. I
think that most puncture bites if it's a tooth, unless
it was a huge dog biting a very small dog,
the intestine will probably just move out of the way
from that tooth by the time it gets through the
body wall and the tissue and the muscle it's unlikely
that it's going to actually puncture unless it's coming on
both ends and it was like almost sandwiching the small
dog's belly into the mouth of the big dog that
did the biting, then you might have a good reason.
Or if there's a huge, huge, gaping hole into the
abdomen of the smaller dog into the dog that was bitten,
where you might be able to see and evaluate the intestin,
or if you're gonna have to go in any way
to repair the multiple layers of the skin and the
fashion the tissue underneath the skin, where you might get
to grab a look as well. But if you just
have a couple of puncture wounds, I'm not one that
advocates going in to a full exploratory unless you have
reason to. And there's a lot of other things that
can be done to monitor and check the dog to
see if it's likely that he or she has an
infection brewing bad enough to justify opening up and exploring
the entire abdomen for just a couple of punctures. But anyway,
these are things you want to discuss with the veterinarian.
You're going to possibly talk to five different veterinarians and
get six or seven different opinions. So there's no right answer,
wrong answer. I guess you know, many of us just
kind of go with what we're used to, what our
experiences are, and make decisions based on that. You know,
For any of you who had have had any kind
of trauma, any kind of hit by car, a fall
off of a height, a bad bad dog fight, anything
like that, I would like to hear from you and
let me know kind of what types of injuries your
pets have had, and let's talk about and see if
you were able to do it over again, have it
treated over again? Was the treatment possibly too aggressive or
possibly not aggressive enough? And so why you guys are
getting the courage to give me a call to let
me know. That's eight seven seven three eight five eight
eight A two contacting me here at pet Life Radio.
Dr Jeff at petlife Radio dot com. You're gonna kind
of mull it over. Give me a call back right
after our quick break, and let's hear what your experiences
have been with any kind of trauma your dog, your cat,
your bird, you name it. Let's hear about it.
Speaker 3: So don't go away.
Speaker 2: We'll be back in just a few minutes here on
pet Life Radio and ask the vets with doctor.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back right after these messages. Stay tuned.
Speaker 4: Every pet is unique. Maybe they're gray in the muzzle
yet young at heart. Maybe they're growing out of the
puppy stage and into their paws and ears, or maybe
they're just trying to maintain a more girlish figure. At
pet Smart, we have the right food for your pet
at a great value for you.
Speaker 3: That's smart.
Speaker 1: Be better together.
Speaker 3: Go to petsmartdeal dot com and save up to thirty
percent on passing gifts for the pets and pet people
in your life. Toys, collars, leashes, pet Smart gift cards,
treats and more. Go to petsmartdeal dot com today E
E T S M A R T D E A
L dot com.
Speaker 5: Friends, they are the understand. That's how I love life.
Speaker 4: I love my pets.
Speaker 3: It's the nis single by Mark Winter, available on iTunes.
Speaker 2: Hi.
Speaker 6: I'm doctor Robin Ganser, President and CEO of American Humane Association,
the country's first national humane organization. Here to tell you
about our new show, be Humane on pet Life Radio.
Each week will be bringing you the latest news and
issues affecting our animal friends and will also be bringing
you interviews with Hollywood's biggest animal advocates here to share
tales about their pets and what they're doing to promote
a more humane world. Our own highly experienced staff and
friends of the organization will also join us each week
to share what they're up to in the animal world.
I hope you'll stop by until then. Let's always remember
to be humane.
Speaker 1: Every week on demand only on pet life Radio dot com.
Let's Talk Past, Let's done Past, Talk about Life Radio
Headline Radio, pet Live Radio dot.
Speaker 2: Com and welcome back. You're here with doctor Jeff Werber.
Here it ask the Bet with doctor Jeff here on
pet Life Radio. And we just talked about some uh
you know, in emergency situations, one has to start thinking,
reasoning first and foremost, no panicking. And I think that
some of these emergency facilities are how great they are
in them thrill that they're around. Sometimes are in such
a panic mode because some of their cases are cases
that require panic. That every case ace, they panic and
they want to do everything and they want to do
it now. And I still think we can forget that.
We still have to have a game plan, you know,
I mentioned earlier that I just came back from speaking
at the Central Veterinary Conference. They call it CBC East
because this conference has the original conference is a in
August in Kansas City, and that's called the Central Veterinary Conference.
Then they started to accommodate more veterinarians and practice managers
and receptionists and technicians practicing in all different parts of
the country. They introduced a number of years ago CBC West,
which is every late October in San Diego, and CBC East,
which is in DC Maryland area. Really a beautiful conference
and a great venue, and one of the talks I
gave and I'm going to sort of change, hopefully change
a lot of the way a lot of you think,
and it's really to benefit your veterinarians. And I'm hoping
most of you listening to our show have really good
relationship with your veterinarian and love your animals, love your pets,
which is probably hopefully why you're tuning in to Pet
Life Radio in the first place. And one of the
things we talk about, and I lecture about this frequently
is marketing. How veterinarians need to market to their community,
market to their own clients and We're not taught this
in school. We don't take a class in marketing. We
don't take a class in salesmanship and in communication, which
would be so important and unfortunately, an observation I've made
several years ago, just looking at my classmates, my colleagues,
my friend, my veterinary friends, is that one's success in
practice has very little to do with their competency as
a veterinari practitioner. It's a lot of the ancillary things
that make the difference. It's their ability to communicate, how
they show their caring. You know, It's interesting that when
I first I'm one of those guys. And again this
is typical of many veterinarians that wanted to do this
ever since there were little kids. And I've always felt
this amazing connection to animals. And when I was a kid,
I had animals all I ever thought about. In elementary
school and high school, I couldn't wait till I was
a veterinarian, something I wanted to do ever since I
was little. I'm talking five or six year old little.
So for me, it was just a natural connection I've
always had with pets, including my own growing up, and
I remember when I was first started as a practitioner,
and I was working for a veterinarian that I used
to work with when I was a technician before veterani school.
And I remember walking to this room and seeing this
little dog and he was so cute. It was like
a little Chihuahua kind of dog. And I picked this
little thing up and he's just nibbling on my face
and he's licking my lips and he's just adorable. And
I'm going, oh my god, this dog is so cute.
And this lady is looking the owner and she says
to me, I'm telling you, it shocked me. She goes,
I've never seen a vet do that. And I'm thinking
to myself, how is it that veterinarians, we veterinarians love
animals so much that you wouldn't do that. Of course
you do that, But I think that when a dog owner,
a dog parent sees that coming from their veterinarian, it
just gives them an automatic sense of security that this person,
this guy, or this girl really loves my pet and
they're going to take good care of it. And mind you,
I was a brand new vett. They knew nothing about
me skill wise. I was developing my skills at that point,
but it worked automatically. And I think that it's very
important that veterinarians that you guys trust, that you like
your own veterinarians, you do what you can to support them,
to help them because it will. And one of the
things I've noticed, and when we go back to the old,
the old marketing strategies, we always used to say how
important it was for every client that leaves your office dissatisfied, unhappy,
they're going to tell ten people, but clients that leave
happy are only going to tell three, which means, as
we used to lecture, we used to talk about that
you need to work over three times. Is hard to
make people happy for everyone that leaves your office unhappy
or dissatisfied. And I've always challenged that because my feeling
is even the three is not real, because I guarantee
that if I were to ask you, do you like
your vet, you'd say yeah. If you were sitting at
socializing with your friends and one friend said I'm getting
a new puppy, I'm getting a new kid, I'm getting
a new whatever, would you immediately say, oh my god,
you got to go see my vet. Here sees the
best you would do that, But you don't go home
after a good, successful, happy vet visit, which of course
by now you've come to expect, and run home and
tell ten people you don't tell one, you don't tell two,
you don't. You'd wait more passively until the subject came
up on a social event or on a conversation you
were having with somebody about pets, where then you might say, well,
they just come right right and ask you, oh, I
know you have a dog, who's your vet? Then you'll say, oh,
I got the best of the vest vet in the world.
But people that want to complain, they complain big time.
And now my point is, and we talk about this,
and I'm amazed how true to life this is affecting
many of the veterinarians. I mean, I am most in
the room. I was lecturing to probably forty or fifty
veterinarians that this is the norm that they are getting
yelled at. They are getting berated online because of a
problem that often never even involved them. It was a
problem with the office, it was a problem with the billing,
it was a problem with something, and not even the
care provided by the doctor. And yet you go online
and you read all these horrendous things. So my challenge
to you and believe it or not, and I'm actually
working out myself here at my hospital, is we have
someone and his sole responsibility is social media. His sole
responsibility is forcing me to do my tweets, to make
my entries onto my doctor Jeff at my Facebook page.
Because when people now are looking for veterinarians, they're looking
for recommendations. They're no longer going the routine sources like
the Yellow Pages or ads or mailers that they used
two years ago. They're not even asking their friends anymore.
They're logging on to Google. They're logging on to Yahoo,
or to city Search, or to or Heaven Forbid, to Yelp,
where that's how they're getting their recommendations. And anyone, especially
especially new parents that are in that twenty eight to
forty age range, and let's face it, anyone out there
listening veterinary wise, those are the perfect clients because then
you know, not only do you have a young pet hopefully,
but you have a young client who's going to be
with you for twenty five years if you play your
cards right. And these are the ones they're first stop
when looking for anything, be it a dry cleaner, be
at a restaurant, be it any service provider, or an
auto mechanic, you name it. The first place they're going
to go is onto the internet. Those phones come out
of their pockets or their purses as fast as you
could say boom, and they are looking things up on
these websites. That's how people are trying to find your veterinarians.
So you out there, you animal lovers who hopefully are
also appreciate what we do, what your veterinarian does for
you and your pet. You need to be more proact.
You need to think about what doctor Jeff is telling
you today, and you need to go online. You need
to go write a review for your veterinarian. You need
to take a more active participation in sharing your experiences,
your hopefully great experiences that you have with your vet
and sharing them with the thousands and thousands of pet
owners that are also logging on to these sites. And
they want to know who's good, who you trust, who's
been treating you well, who's been taking amazing care of
your pets. Don't assume that it's the other guy. Don't
wait until someone comes over to you and says, oh
my god, I know you have a dog, who's your vet?
I need a new vet or I just got a
new pet. We're looking for recommendations. Don't wait for that.
You need to be more proactive because your veterinarian needs
you to be more proactive. And the truth matter is
they're not going to ask you. They're shy, they're embarrassed,
they think it's uncool, and it's really not. You know,
think about this way. You think about the old fashioned
endorsements that you see any again. And you may not
see this in many parts of the country, but I'm
sure you're going to see it in the big cities.
But how many establishments you've walked into? Be at a restaurant,
beat a diner, beat a deli, a dry cleaner. I
use that example lot. And what do you see hanging
up in the restaurant or above the wall and the
dry cleaner. It's the picture of the celebrities that have shopped,
that have frequented that establishment. And that's because everybody right,
they want to go where the celebrity went, and that's
why they posted. Well, in essence, that is an endorsement.
It's a celebrity endorsement that is implied by seeing the
picture of that celebri with a little note to the
owner saying oh my god, thank you so much, or
great meal or whatever they write, right, and you think,
oh my god, that's a great because I'm going to
the same place that so and so ate at. Well,
when you go online and you write a great review,
or you take a picture of you with your pet
and your veterinarian and post it on your Facebook page
and with a little comment of how fans fantastic your
doc is, that's the kind of endorsement that you should
be sharing with everybody. It takes no extra time. It's
something you should really want to do. But now I'm
telling you from the perspective of one who lectures and
teaches marketing, teaches internet reviews and how to handle them,
how to enhance internet image. This is what needs to
be done. So since your client your best not going
to ask you to do it, I'm going to ask
you to do it. Go ahead, take a little time,
be nice and write something really really cool about your
veterinarian I'm sure is working very hard to keep your
pets happy and healthy. So anyway, Oh, by the way,
I don't know exactly when it's going to take place,
but we mark and I Mark Winterrow here at pet
Life Radio, we are going to change our show to
Sunday morning because we know, we hope at least that
there are many of you that would love to take
the time to get on the computer and call or
if you're not in the cars, to call us time
during the day where we want to just if you
want to access me and can't do it at one
o'clock Pacific time and four o'clock Eastern time. So we
are moving to a Sunday morning show. I think the
plan is nine am Pacific time and noon Eastern time.
That way, you're gonna have no excuses. This is before
you you're hopefully getting up out of bed, you're having
your brunch, and you will be able to join us
live here on pet Life Radio. Asked the bests with
doctor Jeff, and I expect to hear from you. I
want questions, I want problems. I want anything that I
can do to help you with your pet and enhance
that bond, enhance that relationship and make your pets happy
and healthy and you the best pet parent you could be.
So until next week, thanks for joining me here on
pet Life Radio once again thanks to our sponsors pro
Sense Pet Products, cong the cong Pet Products, and just
know my offer still holds. Anytime you guys give us
a call, we're gonna send you a free pro Sense product,
a free con toy just for sending me an email
or picking up the phone and giving us a call
or contacting me here online at doctor Jeffert petlife radio
dot com and we'll see her next Thursday.
Speaker 1: Let's talk pets every week on demand only on petlife
Radio dot com.