Is it enough to only clean a dog's teeth with dental chews and sprays or are professional cleaning appointments necessary?

Question

Lauren Adelman · Answer

Is it enough to only clean a dog's teeth with dental chews and sprays or are professional cleaning appointments necessary? The answer is no, it is generally not enough to be point blank. Dental chews and sprays can help minimizing or decreasing tartar and plaque buildup, just like brushing your teeth can. But if you think about us, dogs are very similar, dogs and cats are very similar to people. We brush our teeth twice a day, every day, and we still need to go for annual or biannual professional cleanings. And so if we really want to clean properly, it involves general anesthesia with x-rays because a lot of the disease is below the gum line and a full cleaning and extractions if needed. Anesthesia-free dental cleanings are not enough. Now when these need to be done really depends on the age of the dog, the size of the dog. My little dog here, my Brussels Griffin, Freddy, you can see he has a squished face. He needed to have his first dental at three years old and he already needed multiple extractions. So it's really important that you discuss this with your veterinarian and follow their recommendations regarding when a dental cleaning is first needed. But those other things can help and they can prolong the time between cleanings, but they're not enough on their own.

Christine Wickenheiser · Answer

Is it enough to only clean a dog's teeth with dental, choose and sprays, or are professional cleaning appointments necessary, professional cleaning, appointments are 100% necessary, the canines and then sizers, those are grabbing teeth. They do not chew hard and four cats. A lot of their teeth are just used for killing. They don't chew with their teeth. A lot of times swallow, things whole. So choose only help. If your dog actually choose when you have, Multiple pet household. They chew really fast and B big hunks off, so they can hurry up and eat it before. The other pet takes it away from them, get your pets teeth professionally, cleaned half of the tooth information is under the gum line. It's below the gum line and your pet can't talk to you and tell you that it hurts when they drink coffee, or when they ice cream, or every time they, you know, do something with their mouths that there's pain. We find that under anesthesia. It's amazing. The information we have find during a dental procedure with pets, dogs, and cats have to have their teeth professionally cleaned to enhance their quality of life. It's a game changer.

Chris Pachel · Answer

Is it enough to only clean a dog's teeth with dental, choose and sprays, or are professional cleaning appointments necessary. The important thing to remember is that those cleaning appointments are way more than just a cleaning appointment. They are truly an oral Diagnostic and comprehensive oral health care plan. Meaning that we're going to be looking for fractures of teeth. We're going to be looking at jaw issues. We're going to be looking at the way in which the teeth. Come together. We're going to be looking for lumps and bumps with in the oral cavity that are going to be difficult to evaluate when a pet is awake. And when it comes to oral pathology Pockets or some of those other things, that we might identify at our own dentist appointment with some of the probing, or even just with flossing, those things are really difficult, if not impossible to identify in a wake animal. So, even if we have a patient, whose teeth are I see white and we can't obviously see any concerns, they're still going to be value in that. An aesthetic procedure evaluating that patient under anesthesia as well as doing comprehensive. Oral exams and dental X-rays to identify what may be going on under the gum line.

Elizabeth Thompson · Answer

The question is, is it enough to only clean a dog's teeth with dental chews and sprays or are professional cleaning appointments necessary? The short answer is yes. Dental appointments with your regular family veterinarian are necessary because a lot of dental disease starts below the gum line surface. So taking dental x-rays can help reveal cracks or tooth root abscesses, things that really can become very problematic as they progress but can be caught early on with routine dental care and dental x-rays. So you really want to make sure that you catch things early on. That's going to minimize tooth root extractions and other problems that might come about. And then you also want to think about the fact that the tooth in general in a dog is very similar in composition and anatomy to that in a person. So if you never brush your teeth and you occasionally just chew on some chew bones or spray your mouth with something, you're really not going to decrease bacterial load. And we don't typically brush our dog's teeth regularly. Some people do, but I will admit that I don't. So having routine dental cleanings is really going to be important for their overall health.

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"Is it enough to only clean a dog's teeth with dental chews and sprays or are professional cleaning appointments necessary?"