Most of the time a follow-up appointment is required. If I'm doing an exam and, say, I find that your cat has periodontal disease or maybe even a fractured tooth, it's very rare that I'm able to proceed and go and put the cat under general anesthetic and perform the procedure right then and there on the spot. We need to prepare, we need to have the animal fasted, we might want to run blood work before, those kinds of things. So typically we diagnose on the first visit and then have them come back for treatment on a later visit.

X-rays help us to better diagnose what's going on, not only in the mouth but, more importantly, under the gums where we can't see. For example, you might have a diseased tooth that looks like there's some tartar on the outside but the crown looks pretty solid and the tooth is not loose, but you do an x-ray and maybe you uncover that one of those roots has a tremendous amount of bone loss around it. Well, that tooth at that point is usually not a viable tooth so it would need to be extracted. Without x-rays, you would never have a way to know that.

There's a wide array of things they can have, the most common being simple gingivitis. You can have periodontal disease, and you can have tumors or growths in the mouth. You can have broken teeth. Cats are especially prone to what's called oral resorptive lesions. I think that's a pretty thorough list of them that we see. Depending on what we find, they all require different types of treatment.

To be quite honest, we're looking for anything abnormal. During every single exam we do on a dog or cat, one of the things we look at is their mouth. So it allows us to know what a normal mouth looks like. And that way, in contrast, when you see anything that's abnormal, it very quickly stands out to you. And that's what we're looking for.

The most common things we see—especially here in South Louisiana in the spring and summer—is allergic dermatitis. Some people call it atopic dermatitis. It’s all referring to the same thing, in that dogs are allergic to something in their environment, and then their skin becomes inflamed and irritated. Because the skin is inflamed and irritated, often those will be followed by bacterial skin infections. Those are the most common things we see, but to make a little bit more thorough list, you also have parasitic diseases, ticks, mites, and fleas. Those things are also very commonly seen. And, occasionally, we'll see fungal skin conditions. Thankfully, these aren’t as common, as they can be a little tough to cure.