Speaker 1: You were listening to Petlifradio dot com.
Speaker 2: Well, good morning, oh good afternoon, and whatever the case
may be, you are here live with Doctor call In Show,
asked the bets with Doctor Jeff, and we're here for you.
We're here to talk about your pets. We're here to
answer questions, We're here to talk about anything you want.
As a matter of fact, we'd love to hear from you,
just to call us and tell us just how great
your pets are. What do you have? I'd like to
know I have ten, I have five and five some
of you have me. Been on my Facebook page at
doctor Jeff Werber and read, unfortunately about the sad fact
that I had to say goodbye to three of my
cats in the last two months, which was really tough.
So I'm down to ten animals. I know that for
many of I might be kind of crazy, but I
like thirteen a lot more. I want to hear what
you have. We're here to talk about pets. I always
have an agenda. I'm always talking about something because I
know so many of you are afraid to call in.
It's so easy. Eight seven seven three eight five eight
eight eight two once again eight seven seven three eight
five eight eight eight two. Just pick up the phone,
give us a call and we can talk about your pets. Also,
you can easily just log ont to pet Life Radio,
click on the Ask the Vets with Doctor Jeff tab
and join in on the conversation. When you get to
that page, you'll see a nice box and it says
join the conversation. We'd love to have you join in.
And lastly, you can just send me a quick email
to Dr Jeff. It's doctor Jeff at petlife Radio dot
com and our wonderful producer Mark. We'll send that email
directly to me live on air and we can talk
about whatever question you want to talk about. Or it
doesn't have to be a question, it could just be
a comment. It could be something about your pets. Because
you know why we're here. We're here because we love
our animals. So I'm sitting here nine am in Southern California,
beautiful southern California, talking to Mark, our producer who's based
in South Florida. I know it's gorgeous there. I hope
wherever you're listening it's beautiful. I know that they're expecting
some more not souch. Great weather in the northeast so
we could talk about that too. Pets and cold weather,
that's a great topic. And of course we're here because
with help of our sponsors, pro sends pet products. These
are over the counter products available to the masses, but
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Kang are great toys. In fact, anyone who sends us
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they're sitting I have them here, guys, they're waiting to
go out. We need you to call in, We need
you to join in the conversation. We just need you
to talk with us. Anyway, before you know, we were
at a couple of conferences. I got another one coming
up actually next week. Right after my show next Sunday,
I'm leaving for Las Vegas for the Western Veterinari Conference,
which is a biggie where we just got back from Orlando,
and which is the North American Veternight Conference and the
Western Veterinic conference, probably the largest veterinani conference on the plant.
We're talking, you know, all said and done between the veterinarians,
the families, the exhibitors, the faculty. I mean we're looking
over sixteen thousand, almost seventeen thousand people, which for the
veterinari industry is is it's quite a lot. You know,
we're not huge. I mean certainly it's no CS Computer
Electronics Show, it's no GDC the Game Developers Conference, but
for a professional conference, it's a good size. So heading
to WVC Western Veterini Conference, and I'm looking forward to it.
It's a great way. We know, there's so much to learn.
And what's so amazing to me is, and we've talked
about this before, that when it comes to medicine, it
is believed that every five years, half half of what
we knew to be as gospel becomes obsolete. So when
you think about when you're out of school for quite
a while, as I have been over thirty years, what
happens is I mean I look at old textbooks and
I kind of glanced at them today it's like, oh
my god, that drug isn't even in existence anymore, and
here we are that that was the drug we got
a culture back last week on a dog who had
like it's a commersa. It's a methodist and resistant staff infection.
And one of the medications that was on the list
that we could use is something that I mean, I
haven't used in ten years, and yet it's and maybe
that's why, maybe that's why it was effective because it
hasn't been in use that the particular organisms have not
had a chance to build their resistance to it, and
it was still effective. So that I was I had
to go order a medication to have in the hospital
that God haven't seen in a long time. So it's
pretty cool. And that's why it's great to go to
these conferences. We call it ce continue education obviously required
by our various states, but it's good because it's a
great way to share ideas. I always joke, you know,
the best way to learn things is to hire a
young associate, because what they are learning and what they
have just learned is within that quote unquote five years.
The stuff that they know is not obsolete. Stuff that
I learned zillion years ago is clearly obsolete. So in
keeping with the you know, what I like to do
is is just we're just covering organ sisms. We're covering
problems that many of you may not even know are problems.
But when you hear it, I'm hoping that you're going
to say to you, oh my god, my dog had that,
my cat had that. And what I want to try
to do is give you a better understanding of some
of the disease processes. And more importantly, you are going
to be faced when you when you are you know,
encountering these problems with your pets, you'll see your veterinarian
and you are going to be faced with some decisions
to make. Be they what tests, how do I approach
the case? And you know, let's face it, the cost
of care has gotten very expensive. So my goal here
is to try to help you, along with your veterinarian,
develop a game plan, because I don't like the approach
where you see a problem and then you run every
test in the book today because you have to rule
everything out today. You save that stuff for the emergencies.
When you have an emergent problem and you don't time
is not on your side, then yes, sometimes you have
to take that approach. But most of the time we're
having issues that have been going on for a while,
and there's a certain chronicity, and then you finally go
to your dock and you talk about the history and
how long has it been there? Well, I noticed for
the last several weeks, so dart it. If it's been
going on for several weeks, another day or two or
three is not going to make a difference. So what
you do is you start based on the history, based
on the physical. We have a starting point, and we
are going to order up the tests that most likely
fit this problem to help us make a diagnosis. And
then if those tests all pen without giving us an answer,
then we can move on to the next set of tests.
But we don't want to test for that bizarre esoteric
condition disease that one might see once in a thirty
five year practice career, and test your dog for it today.
So anyway, here we are. We've been talking about eyes
over the last several weeks, and we speaking of emergencies,
and often this is considered by some an emergency. Certainly
to you it is, But any qualified experienced veterinarian is
going to look at this and say, no, no, no, no, ma'am,
this is not an emergency. And we've been talking about
cherry eye, they prolapsed gland of the third eyelid, and
we talked about the breeds. We see it in the
Cocker spaniels, the loss of the sheet to the English bulldog,
the Rottweiler. I mean, of course it can happen to
any dog, but we see an increased predisposition in these breeds.
And how it's something that pops up suddenly. I mean literally,
you go eat dinner and come back and there it is,
and how ugly it looks. It looks kind of weird.
All of a sudden, you see this big, bright pink
thing on the inside corner of the eyes, sticking out
one side, both sides, and it looks pretty weird and
certainly something that might cause you to panic a little bit.
Now we've learned some interesting things about this particular gland,
and that is that it is a very reactive gland.
It's a lymphoid type tissue, so it reacts to whatever
we don't always know what is reacting to. But also
that it serves a function, a function that we don't
necessarily need. Our pets don't need when they're young and healthy,
but they do as they get older, and because of
this newer knowledge, and I don't mean new yesterday, I
mean new in the last twenty years. This clan functions
to provide accessory tiers when the dog's own tier glands
are not functioning as well and need those tiers. It
changed how we treat this condition because the condition back
when I started practice, it was pretty easy surgery. Remove
the land. You just step it off, cut it a
little suitsure, little cautery. You're done, and the dog's going
to do great. And it will. It's going to do
great for a long time. If you have one of
those dogs that had this condition and as it reaches eight,
nine to ten and its own tier glands start to
dry out, they don't function as well, they're going to
look to that prolapse gland and say, hey, we need
your buddy. And the prolapse plan isn't there anymore because
it was taken away when that dog was a youngster.
And now we have a condition called dry eye, which
is much more challenging to treat than the excessive tearing
or having that terry eye there that prolapse plan. So
what we need to do. The reason and I mentioned
before we signed off last week, is that one of
my clients had a dog that had a cherry eye.
It was at night, she panicked, took it to an
emergency and the emergency facility made two huge mistakes in
my book. Number one, when many gps like myself send
a case to an emergency clinic, we want them to
perform which is necessary to stabilize that pet, to get
them through the night. And their job is not to
treat and solve the problem. Their job is to stabilize.
Let's take care of the emergency, the emergent condition, and
that's it. And then in the morning, if so, talk
to your veterinarian, and then you develop the game plan.
A veterinary might say no, no, I'm you know, I
could see it. We need XYZ. We don't do that here.
We're a general practice, you're a specialty clinic. So why
don't you keep the pet there and do those tests?
Or your veterinarian and say, okay, thank you very much.
I have the owners pick up and bring the pet
back here because I'm going to take over from here.
That's kind of what I like to do. And my
clients like that too, because I don't know these other doctors.
They don't trust these doctors. So sure enough it was
a young doc. What got into him or her, I
have no idea, But not only did they treat it,
which means they did a surgery which they didn't really
need to do because as I mentioned, it's not an
emergency condition, but they actually did the wrong surgery. They
removed the gland. Interestingly, and I was right. It is
so well known nowadays, especially in the US veterinary schools,
that we do not remove that land of the third
eyelid when it prolapses. We actually tuck it down. That
my bet was. When I heard that this doctor removed it,
I said, I can pretty much guarantee either they were
sleeping in the lecture, they worked with a much older
practitioner and wasn't paying attention to the new way of
doing things, or which is where I was right, they
were a graduate of a foreign veror night school, and
sure enough that was the case. So it's very interesting.
But don't let anybody remove the prolapse gland of your
dog's third eyelid if it prolapses, because that's not the
way we treat them.
Speaker 1: Now.
Speaker 2: What we do is we tuck it in. It needs
to stay there. It does serve as a function, the
function of accessory tear production. It's lymphoid, it's reactive, it
needs to be there. And then all our job is
is some sort of technique and there are a number
of them, to tuck it into the third eyelid itself,
so it is no longer prolapsed, it's no longer visible,
it's no longer causing a problem, it's no longer drying
out because it's not being covered by tears every time
the dog blinks. But we don't want to remove it,
so you want to, you know, kind of keep that
in mind. Not an emergency, don't remove it, tuck it
in and there you have it. So moving on from
Cherry I, which we are going to do. Right after
our break, I realized, oh my god, this time goes
so fast. Meanwhile, still want to hear from you us
A call back very easy eight seven seven three eight
five eight eight eight two. Join it in the conversation
here on petlife radio dot com. Click on the Ask
the vets with doctor Jeff tab and you will be
joining in. Just start typing away or once again email
me Drgeff at petlife radio dot com. Stay tuned. We'll
be right back after the short break.
Speaker 1: We'll be right back right after these messages. Stay tuned.
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Speaker 2: Hey, welcome back. You are here live with doctor Jeff Weerber,
hosts of Askator Doctor Jeff, our only live call in
radio show here on pet Life Radio. And I still
want to hear from you. I haven't heard anything either.
There's no way, no way that people are listening right
now or joining us online and have not had a
problem with their pet's eyes. I refuse to believe it.
So I know you have had it. Give us a call,
give me a call. Let's talk about what the problem was,
what was done? How are we doing you know again,
we talked already about glaucoma. We're going to be coming
up next, we're going to talk about cataracts. However, I
want it to just you know, we have to solve
a little issue here when it comes to plain old vision.
How many times have you heard that dogs a don't
see well? Dogs are color blind? What is the reality
and are they color blind? How well do they see? Well?
It's interesting that dogs, as far as the senses you know, taste, smell, hearing,
touch and vision, probably one of their weakest is their site.
Unless they are one of those breeds that we call site.
Those are the Salukis, the Borzoi is. Now the really
lean kind of dogs, even Afghans or sighthounds that actually
have a pretty amazing sight. Most dogs rely more on
their sense of smell, which is just hundreds of times
better than ours. I often joke and brownies or cakes
that are wrapped in that clear cellophane, you know, like
fairy tale cakes or any of those. The joke is
I would say to somebody, if you smell the completely
brownie or whatever that is in the cellophane, and you
put it up to your nose and you try to smell.
Would you smell anything? ANSWER's no, there's nothing. A dog
not only could smell through that clearly wrapped sealed cellophane,
it could probably tell you if it could talk, of course,
exactly what ingredients and how much of each was in
the brownie. That is the difference when it comes to
the scent. Now, when it comes to vision, however, we
have receptors in our eyes and cones, and the cones
are what really give us a lot of good detail. Now,
rods don't give us the detail. But rods are really
cool for detecting things like movement. So for example, here's
the classic that dogs need movement for hunting. They don't
really need super great detail, which is why in low
light situations, your own dog might even bark at you
walking down the hallway because he hasn't really had a
chance to pick up the scent yet. But he's looking
at you and you are just a body. You don't
have that clear face, that detail that he knows the
color of your skin. It's not until he normalizes for
that second that he picks up who you are. So
dogs have more rods than cones. They can see color,
but they don't see the detail. So a red versus
a a burgundy, a little bit of a purple, a mauve.
To them, it's all pretty much the same, now, coul
they tell them see red and blue, Yes they can.
So there's certain colors that the spectrums and the detail
between the different shades that they don't decipher as well
as we, but they could still see colors. For example,
I'm sure you've seen a pinstripe suit before. So let's
say we're talking a navy pinstripe suit, and let's say
that the stripes are like a gray, like gray, okay,
a nice gentleman's suit. Well, if you look at that,
all they would see pretty much is the navy, the
one color. It looks solid. But if one of those
stripes happened to move, they would sense that in a
split second. So the difference is they have a great
ability to detect motion change in position, but they don't
have a great ability to actually see the fine detail
of those skinny stripes in against that navy blue color.
So hopefully that'll give you a better understanding of where they
come from and why they are so good at doing
what they do, i e. The hunting. They need to
see that movement. So anyway, rods versus cones. Dogs have
more rods and cones. We have more cones and rods,
So our detail fine detail is better than theirs. Their
ability to detect in motion is way better than ours.
So let's talk for a second about cataracts. What is
a cataract and a cataract is a Basically, it's a thickening.
It's a material that accumulates, it's whatever. The accumulation could
be many things. Actually inside the lens of a dog,
Now where does a lens sit. If you look at
our eye, a dog's eye, you see what's called the iris.
The iris is the colored portion of the eye. And
it also between the iris and the lens separates the
front portion of the eye from the back portion of
the eye, which is also the separation of the aqueus
and the vitreous, which are the different substances inside the
eye itself, the eyeball itself. You have the anterior chamber,
you have the posterior chamber, separated by the lens, which
sits just behind the iris. So what happens in low
light situations, Well, in low light situations, the iris retracts back,
thus the opening the pupil enlarges to allow more light
going through this lens and then hits the retina, which
is the actual nerve receptors in the back of the
eye transmitting information through the optic nerve to the brain,
and what is visualized is now processed. In highlight situations,
in a dog, you could see this pupil become very small, constricting.
In cats it becomes slit. Like in goats, it becomes square,
and it's blocking off the light because there's too much
light coming in, making the opening smaller, et cetera. But
the key here, if you realize, if you've noticed, is
that information, that light, that vision, that field has to
go through the lens. So what happens when the lens
itself is either thickened, is no longer see through, it
has deposits in it, and now the light can't get through.
So what's going on is, in essence, the visual field
is affected, sometimes dramatically completely, in which case it's not
that the retin is not working. The nerves are working fine,
the retin is working fine, the pupil's working fine potentially,
but what's not getting through is the light. So what
is supposed to go through, So Consequently, oftentimes dogs with cataracts,
the body thinks the reason it's not seeing is because
they're not enough information coming through. So the pupils will
basically just widen, all right, because the thought is that
we can't get enough light through. It's not that the
light's not there, it's because of the cataract, the deposition
of material within the lens itself. It's not allowing the
light to go through. The brain is thinking that it's
just a matter of light. So dogs with cataract typically
will have very large pupils. Now, cataracts be due to
a lot of different things. There is a disease process,
and if you recall when we talked about diabetes melodis,
which is the sugar diabetes, we often see a very
high correlation between a cataract and diabetes. So oftentimes this
deposition of material within the lens causing a cataract is
secondary to that which is going on in the blood
with the high blood sugar in a diabetic So therefore
we do see very very high amount of cacts cataracts.
Otherwise it could be congenital cataracts. We see it in
young dogs. It could be related to age as a
matter of fact, we need to talk about another age
related problem, which in essence is considered pre cataractus, meaning
if it kept going, if it kept progressing, it would
ultimately turn into a cataract. And we call that lenticular
or nuclear sclerod And I know that everybody out there
listening who has an older pet knows what this is.
You may know the name for it, but you know it.
And that is where the pupil itself, instead of being black,
looks kind of bluish grayish. And when that happens, that's
because the change, it's an age change associated with the
lens capsule itself. And though it's not really officially a cataract,
it's a pre cataractist condition. And I always joke to
a client say, oh my god, is that my dog
gonna go blind to it? I said, no, no, it's
going to turn in to a cataract if your dog
lives to about forty. But unfortunately that ain't happening. So
if a dog, very very common older dogs, they can
still see. If I do my ocular fundic exam looking
at the back of the eye with a dog with
the lenticular sclerosis, I can still see everything. Now in
low light situations, they might have a more difficult time
because of the grayish nature the light going through is
gonna be impeded somewhat, so it will seem a little
more difficult for them to see in low light. But
the truth is it's not not going blind. It's very common.
And when we get to next week, as we are
out of time, which is the story of my life,
we will talk about some of the conditions, the treatments
that we can do for cataracts and maybe guide you.
And if any of you listening have had animals with
severe cataracts or even lenticulus grosis, I'm giving you a
one week notice in advance. You're gonna give me a
call at eight seven seven three eight five eight eight
A two, send me an email this week to doctor
Jeff that's DRGF at Petlife Radio dot com, or be
prepared to join in on our conversation anyway. Thanks for
joining me this week, have a great week once again,
thanks for our sponsors pro Sense and Calm, and we
will be here next Sunday morning or afternoon nine o'clock
Western time out in the Pacific by me and noon
out east. We'll see you that week.
Speaker 1: Let's talk pets every week on demand only on petlit
radio dot com.