General anesthesia is very scary for us, but we do it very routinely. We know that monitoring is part of the safety of general anesthesia. The doctor that's overseeing your cat while it's here for dental care will be overseeing anesthesia along with a trained pet nurse and a wonderful electronic monitor. So there are about three different ways we're monitoring your pet under anesthesia.

When we do teeth cleaning, we use a lot of water and a dental x-ray unit, so we need your pet to be very still during its cleaning so that we can do a thorough assessment. So that means general anesthesia is needed.

Yes, you can. You can let us know if your cat is apprehensive and scared when it comes into the pet hospital. We can prescribe your pet some calming medications so that when they come in for their dental appointment, they're already premedicated, which helps us, them, and you feel more comfortable when they come in for a general anesthesia appointment.

In my opinion, yes. It is a better option as it's significantly less painful, less invasive, and there's a quicker healing time. The pet can return to normal activity, like chasing a ball and running around the backyard in significantly less time than with traditional open surgery. We can more readily perform diagnostic procedures that might otherwise be too cost-prohibitive because open surgery for obtaining biopsies is more expensive or just too invasive for clients to agree to. This minimally invasive keyhole laparoscopic procedure to obtain biopsies or other diagnostic procedures often presents a much lower barrier for clients. They more easily say, "Yes, I want to understand what's going on better so that we can treat my pet more appropriately." In many different ways, it is a better option than open surgery.

With that said, there are limitations. We still need to go into the abdomen with certain surgeries because the laparoscopic minimally invasive technique is not enough. For example, if we have a splenic tumor and we need to remove the spleen, it can't be done effectively through a small port incision. It will require a full open surgery to get the best outcome. So there are certain situations where it's not better, but in most common procedures, it provides a great alternative because of all these discussed reasons.