Yes, in most instances, it’s much cheaper. For example, heartworm treatment is usually in the thousands of dollars, whereas monthly prevention is maybe around $10 to $15. Then with our tick prevention, that does prevent some tick-borne diseases as well, which can also cause some very serious diseases and costly bills just to diagnose them.

Preventative care is critical to have, especially starting with young puppies. When they’re young, the good thing about heartworm prevention is that it treats intestinal parasites as well, which is very common with younger puppies. Then as they get older, it's vital to keep them from getting anything that might worsen other diseases, as well, such as parasites.

Yup that is the goal. Of course, there are always resistant types of fleas. But with our new products, we have seen excellent results, and we haven't had any resistance yet.

We want your dog to be on flea, tick, and heartworm prevention all year round. Now, we do have a few options. We have injectable heartworm medication, which can be given every 12 months, so you don't have to worry about that. With your flea and tick prevention, we have one that's available every three months. Otherwise, we do have the more common monthly prevention for both of those.

So the first thing we do, as with any appointment, is a thorough exam. This is making sure that your dog is healthy enough to be on prevention. Then also, with heartworm prevention, we like to run a heartworm test before we start, just to make sure that we don't have any heartworms present before starting that prevention.

It halts diseases before they start, such as fleas, ticks, and heartworm.

So preventative care is stopping diseases before they start.

They sure could. It depends on what we're looking for and whether the dog is here for a wellness visit versus here for being sick. And often, the question would be, does my pet need to be poked more than once to draw the blood? We can often draw one sample and run many tests off of that, which might alleviate many of the owner's concerns about running multiple tests. We need to run most of our tests with minimal volume compared to their total body volume. So they're not donating blood to us for that type of thing, as it’s not a large amount of it. And then, we can run several different tests if we deem that necessary, but we'll take it step by step and, depending on what the first lab test shows, that may give us an answer, or we may need to run other tests.