Can heartworm be treated in my dog?

Yes. Dogs can be treated for heartworm, and we stage dogs. There are various stages. There are classes of heartworm disease. The dogs are classed based on the changes to the heart and lungs, X-rays, blood work, and the dog’s symptoms. The class one and two dogs, which are earlier stages, tend to do pretty well. We start the heartworm preventative. We start that antibiotic we had talked about before, and then we allow a couple of months for those things to work. It sounds crazy that we would wait that long, but we also have to wait for immature worms in the body that can not be treated with conventional treatment. They're not susceptible to conventional treatment until they become adults. So, we got to wait for those to mature, and that takes a couple of months. We also need dideoxy cycling time to work to destroy the symbiotic bacteria that live in the heartworm.

And then, that antibiotic is also an anti-inflammatory in the lung, so dogs do so much better if we slowly prepare them for treatment.

About two months later, we give an injection called immiticide or Melarsomine, killing adult heartworms. We give it in the muscle of the back. But not one injection is effective, so we have to give another set of injections a month after that, so heartworm treatment is very drawn out. We have to kill these worms slowly. We can't kill them too quickly because, often, we'll have fatal pulmonary thromboembolus. Dogs do not do very well. They'll have many complications from treatment if we do not treat them slowly and prepare them to be treated.

Yes, heartworms can be treated in dogs. The fast kill treatment is recommended by the American Heartworm Society as the best course of action to treat heartworm disease.