How long does a cat dental appointment take?

If it goes well for basic cleaning, polishing, and fluoride treatment, it may be as little as 30 to 45 minutes. We've had procedures go three hours in cats as well, depending on what we’re dealing with here, so it’s hard to give a cut and dry answer. It varies dramatically.

If there are severe odors, such as in stomatitis complex cats, there's infection. And we want to try to get the infection under control before the dental. We continue antibiotics after the dental to get the infection out of the bone. If we're doing extractions or any type of underneath-the-gum work, your pet needs pain medication. If anybody's ever had gum disease and gum treatment at your dentist, it hurts. So we're going to treat your cat with pain management to make sure that they’re not in discomfort.

A dental procedure can vary quite a bit. It usually takes 30 to 45 minutes to get anesthesia, imaging, and cleaning done. It probably takes 45 minutes for most of the cleaning and the recovery. When we find a problem, we want to treat it. That's when we will call you and talk about what's going on to decide together what needs to be done and how to treat that. Taking that into consideration, there can be vast amounts of variation in time. I specifically do just dentistry. We can do advanced things such as root canal therapy. Those procedures can add some time, but we can preserve structure and function without disease or pain. So there are good ways to go about it when indicated.

A cat dental appointment can take anywhere from one hour to up to three hours. It depends on what we find. We sometimes have no idea what we're going to get into when we go into the mouth for cleaning. That's why we want to do a full assessment and do x-rays, and when we uncover problems, we want to have time to deal with those problems. So a dental cleaning just takes as long as it takes.

In our practice, usually about an hour and a half. We always take blood and do pre-anesthetic blood work before cleaning the teeth. With the sevoflurane that we use to maintain general anesthesia, they usually wake up really quickly, so they get to wake up in their home rather than in a clinic.

Dental appointments usually take at least two-thirds of the day. We usually have multiple procedures to do during a day so after they're dropped off we set up the IV catheters, do blood work if necessary, give them fluids and get them prepared for the procedure. The procedure usually lasts somewhere between 45 minutes and an hour and a half. After the procedure, they have to be recovered from anesthesia, they're monitored for a while and then they usually go home in the middle of the afternoon.