How can x-rays help my dog?

The x-rays themselves don't help your dog, but they can help your dog by potentially providing a diagnosis so that we know what the best treatment modality is to fix or heal your dog.

It can help us to know how to treat your pet. If we take an x-ray and we know we are treating, for example, a chronic problem over an acute problem, chronic being continuously going on. Again, pets are great at hiding things. So if we x-ray a dog that comes in for, let's say, lameness of the rear leg, we sometimes see radiographic changes that indicate it didn't just happen this week; this happened months ago. You may not have observed or known about it, and your dog may not have shown you that. But that would carry a different treatment and recommendations than if we did not see long-term changes. This was more of an acute injury, meaning that it was an accident or something traumatic suddenly happened recently. Also, that would weigh in on prognosis. The prognosis of a sudden change might carry a better long-term outcome than if this has been going on for a while. Not that it couldn't have a good outcome, but we would expect there to be some lingering things, and we may want to implement supplements or treatments to help the pet long term.

X-rays can be very helpful in identifying what could be going on, because often our blood work and other lab testing may not be able to tell us as accurately as something like an x-ray or ultrasound.