Speaker 1: You were listening to Petlifradio dot com and.
Speaker 2: Good morning or good afternoon, whatever the case may be
to you. I am your host for the next thirty
minutes here on pet Life Radios Ask the Vets with
Doctor Jeff. I am Doctor Jeff Werber, and I'm here
for you. I'm here for your pets. We're here to
talk pets anything, anything you want to talk about with
your pets. Give me a call. You can easily reach
us eight seven seven three eight five eight eight eight two.
It's toll free eight seven seven three eight five eight
eight A two, or you can log onto pet Life
Radios Ask the Vets with Doctor Jeff. You just click
on that tab. It'll take you to our page and
you will see a big box that says join the conversation.
That's all you need to do is just click on
it and just start typing away. Or lastly, you can
go ahead and send me an email of real time
right now to Dr Jeff Doctor Jeff at Petlife Radio
dot com, and we will read your email, probably read
out loud, share it with everybody, and answer your question.
We're here because of our with the help of our
sponsors that the Kong Toys Kong are great products and
very safe and also Pro Sense pet products are available
at your local mass retailer. I mean Mass, I'm talking Walmart,
We're talking targeting, Kroger, great stuff, venter right quality that
you can use on your own pets at home and
save yourself a bundle. So, as a matter of fact,
that anyone calls in, writes in, and we have one
such email that we are going to get to later
and you will get a free pro Sense and a
free Kong toy just for sending us an email, just
for calling us, just for joining the conversation. It's that easy.
So you come away with info. It's free, and we're
here to help you understand your pets better, not just that.
From my perspective, always has been a veterinarian is I
think that we need to help you understand more about
what your pets needs are and when things aren't going right,
or when I like to say, is when your pet
is adr ain't doing right, what can you do? What
can you expect? And how insane or not should you
or your veterinarian get about trying to finanswers how fast,
how many tests do they need to run, and how
much money do you need to spend? Typically, I think
it's too much. So that's why we're here. We're here
to help and just sort of equip you with a
little bit more knowledge. And in that line, because I
have a lot of I know you're listening out there,
because I get some emails and we're answering them, and
we're going to do another one today. For some reason,
everybody's so shy. Don't be afraid. You know. I had
a live radio show here in Los Angeles on KBC
Talk Radio, and we would get It was an hour show,
and we've got I don't know, maybe fifteen twenty calls
an hour. So I know that if I even cut
that in half, we should be getting at least six
or seven of you to call in, write in eight
seven seven three eight five eight eight A two. It's
that easy, and it's free. So over the last several weeks,
going through our organ systems, we've been on eyes. We
went through a lot of ocular conditions that one might
see or expect to see, and I sort of wanted
to end with probably the most common reasons that you're
going to bring your pet in for an eye problem,
and that is what we talked about last week. Conjunctiveis
conjunctiveis just being an irritation. A redness the white part
of the eye called a sclera is injected, meaning if
you see it's a lot redder pinker. If you look
up real close and personal, you'll see as a matter
of fact. But I would recommend all of you do
not right now because I want you to stay online.
But when you get home or when you're with your pets,
I want you to lift up their upper lid and
really get a good look at the sclera. Because their
sclera has more vasculature normally than we do. Their whites
of their eyes are not as white. They do have
a fair amount of visible vessels that you can see.
And the reason I want you to do this is
because I want you to understand and know your dog
or cat's normal. So when it is abnormal, when it
is too white, okay, that could mean anemia. If it
actually the white sclera has a yellowish haze, that could
be jaundice that could indicate a major liver problem. Or
if it is much pink or reder like our pink eye,
then you know we have a scleeral injection. We have
probably some sort of inflammatory condition going on. That's called conjunctivitis. Now,
what is the conjunct taiva. The conjunct taiva really is
all the pink tissue surrounding the eye, even the third eyelid.
We talked about it a couple of weeks ago last week.
That is a part of the conjunct taiba. When that
is in flame, when you see more of it, that
is conjunctivitis as well. So what causes conjunctivitis? And the
list is very long and it could be anywhere from allergy,
from irritation. For example, I can give you a good
one if you ever driven with your dog in a car. Okay,
what do they love to do? They love to stick
their head out the window of that moving car, even
on an LA Freeway going seventy five miles an hour,
the wind in their face, their ears are flopping, their
saliva's you know, drool is getting all over your back windows.
They love to do it. Well, you know there are
some difficulty with that, and that is that the difficulties
could be that they can get what's called exposure carotitis.
It doesn't seem to bother them, but those dust particles
the air hitting that eyeball it's seventy miles an hour
or more. If it's got his own speed coming at you,
then they that can cause some irritation at the cornea.
So that could cause conjunctivitis. That can cause a caratitis,
which is the inflammation or irritation of the actual cornea,
and that is very very It could be very damaging
to the eye. It gets painful for the dog. They
are actually a product out there called you may have
seen these. They're kind of cute called dogg oles, and
they look like, you know, kind of the old snoopy
the glasses that you wear in the airplane that you know,
if you can remember way back the old snoopy cartoons,
But that's kind of what it looks like. And those
protect the eyes. They look kind of funny. The dogs
tolerate them pretty well, and they are to protect the
eyes from exposure kerotitis and exposure, conjunctividis, other things that
we might see pure allergies. When dogs have an allergic
problem or if something gets in their eye that they're
extremely sensitive to, they get a conjunctividis. For example, when
you have a carotitis, the cornea is irritated. What do
the dogs do? Dogs are continually blinking because the pain
of discomfort. That can also cause a conjunctivitis infection. For
those of you with cats out there, when we have
chlamydia infection, which is one of the respiratory infections that
usually presents with some sort of conjunctividis. Even the virals,
the rhino tracheaetis, the Kalisi virus, which is what we
vaccinate our cats. Again, the f VRCP. The P is
for pad leukopenia cat fever. But these are all problems
that we see related to conjunctividis. So it could be allergy,
it could be infection, it could be irritation, you name it,
we get that redness. Treatment obviously depends on what the
cause is. If it's pure allergy, then we probably your
veterinarian will recommend some sort of anti it'll be eye ointment,
sometimes oral antibiotics as well. If it's a viral infection,
some sort of anti viral there are some really good
anti viral ophthalmic ointments. There are some really good antibacterial
ointments with cats. With cats, I caution against using the
triple antibiotic ointment. It's okay for dogs, but there is
a it's a small number, but we don't know exactly,
we can't identify. It's kind of like the raisins and
grapes and dogs, is that it doesn't affect every dog.
In fact, doesn't affect most of our dogs, but when
you have a dog that is affected, it's very serious.
So the same thing with the neomycin, one of the
triple antibiotic it's polymix and basitracin and neomycin. Some cats,
a small amount can actually have an anaphylactic reaction to
you knowomycin if they eat it. So what you know,
you put something in a cat's eye, all right, any
of you who have medicated a cat, No, what are
they gonna do. They're gonna take their paw, They're gonna
rub it on the eye, and then they of course
of course gonna lick their paw. So if you have
one of those cats, and we don't know which ones
they are, that might be one with that reaction, then
that is very dangerous. So we recommend some of the
antibacterial alphamic ointments for cats or just things without neomycin.
So steroids, antibiotics antivirals depending on what the case may be.
And one of the things we're gonna get to now,
we're gonna talk about the cornea, but it often goes
hand in hand with the conjunc taiva, and that is
that even though one of the best active ingredients to
combat the inflammation and sometimes the irritation are medications with corticosteroids,
and by the way, cats tolerates steroids extremely well. The
problem is that steroids are contraindicated if there is any
kind of corneal lesion, whether it's a corneal scratch, a
corneal ulcer, So you sort of have to walk and
your veterinarian doesn't have to walk that fine line between
we have to be careful not to use steroids because
of a corneal issue, but we really want to use
steroids to decrease inflammation, pain, et cetera on the other side.
So sometimes we have to first treat the ulcer or
the erosion. When that is healed cured, if we still
at this point have some sort of conjunctivitis or carotitis
going on, then it's okay to use the steroids after that.
So that takes us to the corneal ulso the cornial erosion.
You know, one of the things if I gave you
a quiz and asked you what type and I mean
body type of dog or cat do you think is
most likely to get a corneal ulcer or cornial erosion.
All right, that's what I want you to think about.
We're gonna talk about treating them, and then I'm gonna
have somebody call in. Not only do you maybe have
the answer for me, but maybe you'll get a free
pro sense product and a free contoy. That's not bad.
So we again, there are a number of different depths. Actually, interestingly,
the corny itself has seven layers, and two of them
are tierfilm and then five of tissue, and the depth
of the ulcer or the erosion correlates with this its
severity and seriousness. But interestingly, the dog or cat with
the more superficial ulcer, though not as serious, are actually
in more pain and discomfort. And the reason for that
is the nerve endings that are most sensitive are in
the outermost layers, So once those layers are completely punctured
and go down deeper, they don't seem to be in
as much pain. Yet the ultra is much more serious.
So it's very important. And as many of you know,
I listen, I like to do my own emergencies. I'm
continuously talking to my clients that one of the areas
where I don't mess around. I don't say, uh, you
know what, what's he doing? Now, let's wait till morning
is when it comes to eyes. Because if we have
an eye issue that is not addressed timely, it can
be very serious, so much so that the ramifications might
even require major major surgery or sadly enough, in really
bad cases of a misdiagnosis, nucleation losing an eye. So
we don't mess around with eyes. So when someone calls
in and I tell my staff, I tell my girls uprunt.
Someone calls in and their dog is a squinting, excessive tearing,
rubbing at the eye, it's not well. See doctor's book today.
Can we see you tomorrow? No, it's come in now.
So for any of you who are having these issues
with your pets, your dog's, your cats, I want you
to know that there is a certainly serious component. So
we're here at a halfway point, which is a good time
to break because I'm gonna leave that question out there.
I want to know the body type, the type of dogs.
Name me some breeds that are most likely to have
corneal ulcer or erosion problems, and you could just call
me at eight seven seven three eight five eight eight
eight to two right after the break. Don't go away,
will be back in a few minutes.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back right after these messages. Stay tuned.
Speaker 2: This is my tired of itching face. Does your dog
suffer from persistent itching and scratching? Allergies and skin irritations
caused by environment including pollens, insects, especially fleas, food, and
common household allergens are common problems and dogs. It's easy
to alleviate your dogs is comfort at home with pro Sense.
Pro Sense itch and Analogye products provide fast relief from
symptoms like itsy, irritated skin, skin infections like hotspots and
watery eyes. Pro Sense products are veteran formulated and recommended
to ensure the very best for your pet. Try process today.
Your dog will thank you for best love life, Love
them back with Prosens.
Speaker 3: There's nothing more delicious and healthy than an old family recipe,
and for over fifty years, our family's been creating them.
Especially for your pets. Nutrius Source super premium pet Foods,
dog and cat food that's all natural, holistic and organic.
Nutris Source Pet Foods contain our patented good for Life
system for your pet's optimum health and well being. So
order now, safe quality food made by our family for
your furry family members. Go to nutris Sourcepetfoods dot Com.
Speaker 4: From our famlayr jag Out Family Press. Hey there, pet parents,
this is Christy Vaughan, host of The doggye Dish. Do
you love your furry companion? Do you love making him
or her healthy treats but can't seem to find the time?
Great news, The Doggy Dish is the perfect show for you.
Every episode is chock full of healthy and easy recipe
that are made with ingredients you most likely have on hand.
Tune into The Doggy Dish for yummy and healthy recipes
for your canine.
Speaker 1: Kids every week only on Petlife Radio dot com.
Speaker 3: Let's talk past, Let's come past het Life Radio.
Speaker 1: Pet live Radio dot.
Speaker 5: Com and welcome back.
Speaker 2: You're here live with dot heor Jeff Werber here on
pet Life Radio. And before the break, we asked a question,
and that is we're talking about eyes and eye injuries
like corneal ulcers and corneal abrasions and erosions. And I asked,
what breed, breeds or body type do you think the
most common presenters of these kind of issues. So I
still want to hear from you and get the answer right,
easy question, think about it and we will send you
out a free pro sense and free KLNG toy. So anyway,
as far as treatment, again, if there isn't all short
of erosion, then we're going to use using an antibotic
ointment of type. Sometimes we have to do what's called
deepriding the ulcer, and that is because the body is
trying to heal. And interestingly, you know people don't realize this.
The cornea, the layers of the cornea are just epithelium.
It's exactly like our skin. It's just the cells are
so perfectly aligned and so thin that you could see through.
But it's the same if you ever like have a peel,
or you're sitting on the sun and then you start
peeling your skin off and you can just get a
little piece if you hold it up, it's pretty clear.
So the corny is the same thing, same type of tissue.
So it needs to heal. Sometimes we have to kind
of roughen up the edges a little bit and in
order to stimulate some blood float to the area. We
get some good vascularization and that means the blood is
coming in to help the healing process. Other times we
might have to do your doctor might have to do
what's called a punk tate keratotomy or a linear keratotomy,
and that is we take a very sharp point d
like it's just sometimes a very fine needle and actually
make some slits or in a pattern or a grid
or just little poke dots in the case of a
punk tate, but if a grid or linear, we're gonna
take lines. The whole idea there is the same thing.
We want to go and just get the outers maybe
layer or two of cornea and kind of get them
irritated again to bring in to stimulate the body's response
to get some flow going. We also sometimes might you know,
serum in our blood has healing capability, so sometimes it
we'll do is we will take some blood, spin it down,
sow off the cells, and keep the serum and have
the owners drop some serum. It's their own pets serum,
So there's no concern about rejection of graft or another
animal serum and use that in the eye. That too,
can help bring in some healing actors. Once we get
the corneal ulcer or erosion healed, then we would if
we need still need to eliminate some of the inflammation,
then we'll go ahead and add on the steroid. So
one last thing that's very important to treating any eye problem. Anything,
whether it's the entropy on the lids, you know, whether
it's the tistic is trickiasis, whether it's cornial, whether it's conjunctive,
or whether it's cherry eye. If surgery or medication is
being placed in the eye, it is imperative that your
pet goes home with some type of restraint from rubbing
at that eye. Whether it's Elizabethan collar, whether it's the
tube type collar. Kong has a great one. Whatever it takes,
we have to prevent the pet from rubbing or scratching
at that eye. That is critical, So real quick, I
want to go ahead and read you an email that
we got from one of our listeners. Dear doctor Jeff,
we have a two year old rescue pitbull who's only
eating human food for the past two years. She's eating
regular high protein dogs or less for the past two months,
but her teeth are in bad shape. They are not
chipped or cracked, but it is obvious that she has
not eating the right food. Now she's getting healthier by
our high protein dog food as her coat and overall
health is excellent. I wish to start to clean her teeth.
She will allow me to put my fingers in her mouth,
but not dog toothbrush or even with dog toothpaste. Can
I use a soft towel or what can I do
to cleaner cheeth besides taking her to the vet to
clean professionally. She has tolerated me touching her gums and
teeth with NOL. So this comes from Sharon, and I
already answered Sharon basically as an answered Charin. First of all,
congratulations for adopting a dog, a pitbull. Unfortunately, our shelters
across the country are loaded with them and sadly, sadly,
way too many get put to sleep. They really are
wonderful dogs. They are great with kids. The only thing
I caution is, I'm sure any of you know they
definitely have a tendency to want to fight other dogs,
but most of them are really good with people, and
if they're not, that is in the training. Because the
breed was never intended to be mean to people. It
was only a fighting breed. So anyway I recommend it
to Sharon is this. First of all, the fact that
she lets the teeth and gums being rubbed is great.
I told her to take some really good tasty paste.
You can get poultry flavored, you can get diet fish flavor,
beef flavor, dentifirst toothpaste, it's non stut to gets made
for dogs. And you can literally lift the lip, put
like one or two rubs in the gums and then stop.
That's it. That's it. One or two rubs, takes two seconds,
and they go, oh my god, you're such a good girl,
and give her her favorite treat. Day one, lift the lip,
same paste, et cetera. And now you're gonna go maybe
for four or five seconds, and then you say, oh
my god, you're such a good girl, and you give
her treats again, and the next day you might go
ten seconds. The whole idea is every day a little
bit more until you get to the point. First of all, now,
what is she associating this process with she's associating with
all the hugs, kisses, praise and the treat so within
a very short amount of time they will actually look
forward to it. Even if they don't love the process,
they love the treats and the praise. So once you
get to the point where you can go up and
down and around the mouth, in the back and etc.
Then you can actually slide. They have these little finger
brushes that have either real toothbrush type bristle or just
little like hard rubber bristles, and use that instead of
just your finger and do the same thing. Go slow
at first, and each time it's always associated with the hugs,
the kisses and the dog's favorite treat, and she will
allow in no time, she will allow having your teeth brush.
Once you get to this point and she's used to
the actual brush sensation, then most likely you can now
convert to a real toothbrush for dogs, of course, but
even if you don't, even if you stick with the fingerbrush,
big deal. It's still fantastic now now one of the
things else. So she was concerned about the staining and
the plaque on the teeth. Once the plaque, which is
more of like a film, hardens, and becomes what we
call calculus or tartar. I don't care who you are,
what you are, what you're using. Unless you are a
human dental hygienists or dentist yourselves, and you have the
proper equipment to come and use dental scaling equipment to
peel crack that tartar off, you can't do it. You
can brush between now and next year March. First, you
will not get that plaque off. You might irritate the
heck out of the gums, but you won't get that
tartar off. So if you have, if the teeth have
accumulated the calculus, the tartar, the hardened plaque, if you will,
you need to have those clean professionally. Once you have
the teeth nice and shiny and all that tartar is removed.
Now that brushing which can remove the plaque the film
the early stages, that's where it's going to be most beneficial.
So make sure you consider that. Get your pets into
the habit of having that done. So, Sharon, I want
to thank you. Well, I'm going to be writing you
back so we can get your address. We'll send you
something out. So back to my question, I'm just checking here.
Oh my gosh, nobody joined in the conversation, no emails,
no phone call at eight seven seven three eight five
eight to just think you're missed on a golden opportunity
to get a free calng toy and a process. So anyway,
the answer is this, and you think about it. Logically,
dog's eyes are They're meant for hunting, That's why they are.
The corneas are usually less sensitive, That's why they don't
blink as much as we do, so they often keep
their eyes open. So if you have a dog that
is going through any kind of brush, passing by a
piece of furniture, the leaves, a bit of a plant
in a home, anything that might be sticking out, the
dog with the normal size snout typically their nose picks
it up first and then they can react. They can
react by turning their head, they can react by blinking.
So they typically I mean, I mean, let's put there
say any dog, and any dog does can present with
the corney also kernel erosion, but we see it much
more frequently, I mean much more frequently in the breaky
cephalic breeds. The breakycephalic breeds are those breeds that have
the pushed in faces where everything is compressed between the
tip of their nose and their eyes is almost the same.
I mean it's flat, so you're looking at the Sheetso
the losses, the pugs, the Boston Terriers, the French bulldogs,
the English bulldogs. These are the dogs because of the
Persian cats. Oh my god. We see this a lot
in Persians because they there by the time they get
the signal to their brain to react to that which
their whiskers or their nose sensed or touched right, and
they can try to protect their eyes from blinking, it's
too late. It hit the eyes too, and so we
see this and also they have to If you look
at these dogs' eyes, they are we call them bug eyes.
They are so prominent. They're just sitting out there waiting,
waiting to be irritated. And we see that again. And
it's also why it's one of the breeds of dogs
that will often suffer from what we call a prop
toast eye, and that's either from injury from severe straining pushing.
They can actually pop their eye out of the socket.
It's gross. It looks terrible. People panic if we get
to it quickly, which is why you don't mess around
the eye. We can pop it back in saw the
eyelid shot for a couple of weeks and they are
totally fine after that. So anyway, I want to thank
you for joining me here on pet Life Radios Ask
the Vets. Sadly, only Sharon who called, who sent me
an email, is going to get the free products that
we're going to set out to her. And I want
to thank you once again, Kong and pro Sense. I
want to thank you for being here, joining me here
on Ask the Vets with Doctor Jeff on pet Life Radio.
And we will see you here next week. I'm a
great here.
Speaker 1: Let's talk pets every week on demand only on petlight
radio dot com