Preventative care
09/04/2011
I have just returned home from the annual conference of the American Holistic Veterinary Medical Association. What a wonderful group of people, with more hugs than any other veterinary meeting! It is so nice to be with a group of people whose goals are to support and maintain animal health. All veterinarians have this goal, but sometimes in medicine we spend more time treating diseases than preventing them.
Preventative care is a large part of what I do and I would much rather see you all for annual or semi-annual health checkups than to see my patients when they are ill. As always, the foundation of maintaining good health is nutrition. I have a repeated conversation that I would like to share, and this has been brought to my mind with some recent patients. I would love to see all of my patients, especially cats, eating more moist food in their lives. There is a real correlation with cats developing urinary problems and kidney disease, diabetes, obesity, constipation and other diseases when they are fed strictly dry food. Dry food is convenient for us, but the kitties are getting too much carbohydrate for an obligate carnivore and maybe more importantly, not enough water. Here are links to my cat care and diet sections with more on that.
Preventative care is a large part of what I do and I would much rather see you all for annual or semi-annual health checkups than to see my patients when they are ill. As always, the foundation of maintaining good health is nutrition. I have a repeated conversation that I would like to share, and this has been brought to my mind with some recent patients. I would love to see all of my patients, especially cats, eating more moist food in their lives. There is a real correlation with cats developing urinary problems and kidney disease, diabetes, obesity, constipation and other diseases when they are fed strictly dry food. Dry food is convenient for us, but the kitties are getting too much carbohydrate for an obligate carnivore and maybe more importantly, not enough water. Here are links to my cat care and diet sections with more on that.