From your veterinarian. That would be one option. Depending on what the medication is, we would be able to prescribe, and most things that we prescribe, we carry in-house. But there are certain ones that we would write you a prescription for or call that into a pharmacy where you and I would go to fill the medication, and you can pick up your pet medication there. You can fill them on the Online Store from here as well if you want to have them sent to you. But usually, you'd probably want to get it started, or at least get the first ones started, and then get your refills if necessary. If we carry it in-house, we would immediately prescribe it. One benefit is that you can get that before you ever walk out the door. If it was a medication that would be more long-term, we'd often recommend our online store just for convenience, or potentially a pharmacy locally that might carry that.

If it's a medication by mouth, some will just take it. Some people tell me that anything they put in front of their dog, they're going to eat. So that's great if you have one of those dogs. If you have one like Kyle that's a little wiser to the tricks, you can put it down the hatch. It's still effective. We may talk about other ways to administer medications, whether it's an injection, a topical, or liquid versus pills. Sometimes we might have it formulated differently. Dogs can be tricky sometimes.

There are different categories of pain medication. One we touched on in the other video is the non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, like aspirin. So the dog form of that would be Carprofen or Galiprant. There are a lot of different names for those different types of medications. That's one category. Another category would be Gabapentin, and Tramadol. Those are other types of pain medication that work in a different pathway, and they often work what we call synergistically, which means together. When you give more than one pain medication, if it's necessary to control pain, then you can give less overall pain medication, which is our goal because we don't want a pet to have a side effect or a problem with the medication. And then also there are other methods of helping pain specifically. We also offer the K laser therapy, which is not necessarily a medication, but it is a treatment for pain. And again, you can lower the actual medication you're giving your pet, making it safer overall.

That sounds like a loaded question to me. But yes, there are a lot of human medications that we use for pets. The disclaimer would be that we would want to make sure that we're dosing your pet correctly for the problem that we're trying to treat. One general, common medication that's used at home, and I would still recommend checking with your veterinarian, but Benadryl is often given for itchiness, bee stings, and sometimes even just to calm or take the edge off as it does in people. Sometimes it can cause sleepiness. There are some medications, but without being prescribed for your pet, it's not something that I would necessarily recommend.

Great questions. There are different classifications of NSAIDs, which stands for non-steroidal anti-inflammatories, and while dogs can take aspirin, there are what we would consider better medications and potentially safer medications for inflammation and pain. You can't mix aspirin with some of the right medications that we would recommend that would be better. Aside from aspirin, a lot of the other non-steroidal over-the-counter medications, like ibuprofen and some other things, could actually be very harmful and cause things like stomach ulcers that could even lead to a perforation of the stomach.

Since she's asking the veterinarian, the answer would be yes. Even if I wasn't asking the veterinarian, Google should say, ask your veterinarian.

I think so. That's one of those things you may not realize, but by doing proper prevention, you're helping to prevent a lot of diseases. The preventative medication, making sure your dog's on a leash and in a safe place, the seatbelt or the car restraint. So all those things are prevention. If you practice them well, you can keep your dog safe and avoid a lot of problems.

We tend to focus on puppies. We touched a little bit on that. We think about vaccines and puppy diseases because their immunity is not fully developed or not as robust as it could be. The preventative for the middle stage of life could be to keep them agile and energetic, so they can live a full life. That can be by preventing parasites and feeding them proper nutrition so they're not overweight and their joints don't feel like an old dog's joints when they're only four years old. Later in life, not that old age is a disease, but things tend to hurt a little worse as we get older. We can be more susceptible to diseases as the immune system isn't as robust as we age. So think about all those stages.

Prevention is not just medical prevention. Prevention for puppies may crate training your puppy when you're gone so it doesn't eat things that could cause a blockage. As your pet ages, there are two ends of the spectrum, so take precautions so it doesn't hurt itself. Raise his food bowl, and put the carpet down so they don't slip. So there are lots of different aspects of preventive control. Along those lines that we haven't talked about is behavior. We talk a lot about client education. One reason that pets end up at a shelter is that they're unwanted due to a lot of behavioral issues. So we talk about that in the puppy stages, but if you come to us with a pet that's older, there's still hope, and there are still things that we can do to educate. At that point, it may not be preventative, but it may be something we can work on and do the hard work to prevent problems later.