The Pawfect Health Watch: A Complete Guide for Monitoring Your Dog’s Health
Hello dog parents! This is Krista with Episode #187 on the Wag Out Loud pawdcast. Just checking to see if you have looked into the amazing trusted brands that I highly recommend. And these are products that I have researched and tried that I know, like and trust. And these products will help your dog to thrive as well. So just go to WagOutLoud.com and check out the trusted brands section. And I've negotiated discounts for most of the products, so why not see what can make a difference in your dog's life? And don't forget to also check out the resources page as well, because it's filled with so many very important resources for both you and your dog.
Here is some good news. Pet Food Labels are getting an overhaul starting next year in 2024. And it's going to look more like human nutrition labels, which should make them easier to understand. The Nutrition Facts box will replace the current Guaranteed Analysis section and the calorie statement and also new, there's going to be a specific statement of intended use. For example 100% complete food for adult dogs. And an optional label item will be handling and storage instructions.
Welcome to the Wag Out Loud pawdcast, where we are obsessed with bringing you helpful tips on canine health care, nutrition, and overall wellbeing. If you'd like to support the show, check out the amazing online events, products and resources that I personally recommend on the Wag Out Loud website. I'm your host, Krista and I'm super excited to be bringing you yet another tail wagging episode.
Hello again dog lovers. Thanks for tuning in to a nother informative Wag Out Loud pawdcast episode. Today. I am so lucky to have not one, but two guests. With me today is Dr. Rory Lubold and Dr. Joe Menicucci. And they are here to chat about the Pawfect Health Watch: a complete guide for monitoring your dog's health. And that's what we're all about. Right, is dog health. So gentlemen, welcome to the Show.
Thanks for having us.
Yeah, thank you.
Well, I'm excited. We've had this on the books for quite a while. Before we get started. Why don't each of you introduce yourselves and tell us why you wanted to cover this topic that we're discussing right now on how to monitor our dog's health?
Absolutely, we'd love to like give you some background, my name is Rory Lubold. I'm a veterinarian, practicing exclusively in the emergency realm and really love this topic, because it's so important to really focus on on preventative care and maintenance of health and identifying diseases early, so the pets don't get sick or have it more mild if they do. And so this is a really important topic for me because it helps keep our pets out of emergency rooms or being sick for any reason that we can avoid.
Yeah, and my name is Dr. Joe Menicucci. I'm a veterinarian as well. Actually, Rory and I have been We were classmates, but then also friends for oh, 19 years now. So excited to do this together. We both have like he was saying a passion for pets and making sure that they're healthy. So yeah, my background is that I've done a lot of mixed animal medicine, a lot of mobile stuff. So I would be going to the pet parents’ house and doing more the wellness and care there. So thank you for having us on.
Well, I'm glad you're here to give us a great educational opportunity. So we're gonna be covering the this is a really crucial topic, everybody. Pet Health Management, of course, specifically, we're focusing on dogs. And gentlemen, when we originally spoke, you said that as a dedicated pet parent, our responsibility really goes beyond just providing you know, the food, the shelter, and of course, lots of love. But now we need to understand how to monitor our dog's health to ensure that they do have a happy and healthy life. So I know there's a protocol that you suggest. So why don't we start there and unpack what that protocol looks like.
THE PROTOCOL OF MONITORING
Great. Happy to dive into that a little bit. So obviously, as you've mentioned, Food, shelter and love are the first key components, right? Good healthy food and, and great, great home for them. It's so, so important. The next step beyond that really is focusing on on monitoring. And so there are some things that are pretty, pretty standard monitoring protocol that that everybody's probably familiar with. You check the stool sample for worms for puppies, and you do heartworm testing every year. And those are, those are a great start, there's really a next step beyond that. And it depends a little bit on your region, depends a little bit on what kind of pet you have more age they are. So this is really kind of custom tailored. And we do recommend consulting with your veterinarian, as well, because this is a partnership on how do we keep them healthy as long as possible, and have them live as good a life as possible. So the policies or the protocol, rather, that we we recommend, typically says you know, in most areas of the country, checking a stool sample every every year is probably good enough, in some areas every six months is probably is probably ideal, because there's areas that are have a higher load of parasites. And so that's really important that you're checking stool samples more frequently. In pets that are over three, four or five years old dogs and cats. What we really recommend as veterinarians and most veterinarians have found to be really helpful is starting to check anually for organ functions. So you can certainly check that younger as well. And anytime at about three years old, we really should be looking for organ functions like liver, kidneys, bone marrow function, urinalysis, which is such a key component to that as well. And so you know, we really believe that that annual monitoring is sort of a minimum. And then and then once they get up to the 5, 6, 7 range, being able to check them every six months, is really key. And in some areas that also includes infectious diseases like tick ,tick borne diseases and fungal diseases.
Right. And Dr. Roy, I am glad that you are talking about this. Because we really need to get a baseline on our animals to find out, you know, what's normal for them? Can you talk about the baseline information? What it helps us with? And when, h ow soon should we start, you know, monitoring all of these different areas.
HAVE A BASELINE
Yeah, I think the baseline is so important to really understand that you need to kind of look at it and say a single point in time gives us some good information. So data that we take, say we take a blood test today, that's really important. But if we take that blood test again, in six months or a year, the change between today and then is one of the biggest things that that we as veterinarians will look at. And so it's not just a single point in time, but being able to watch trends and being able to better understand what these changes mean for them, allows us to intervene, change the nutrition, change the medications, change lifestyle, that will actually help to stave off some of the medical conditions that are coming. I think as we as we move into the sort of the machine learning and extra data, stuff that's happening in the world, there's obviously a lot of that happening, that trend is going to be even more important because we're going to see more detail from from having baselines, and then figuring out what changes in three 6-12 months to be able to predict future diseases and head them off before they actually become a problem.
And when we take our dogs to the vet, besides, you know, the eye, ears, nose, heart, the diagnostics that we've just mentioned, you know, the stool sample, urinalysis, what about CBC? How detailed should we get with a blood panel.
BLOOD WORK
So typically, for the blood panel, we're going to recommend at least the core core workup. And that's going to be a CBC which is going to look at all the main cells, red blood cells, and white blood cells and platelets, and a lot of different parameters in there. We also want to see a chemistry that's going to look at the at least the basic organ function for kidney enzymes, liver and pancreas stuff. And so it's really going to get a full picture of how everything works together. And so those are the things that we add in honestly, and this is probably one of the tests to get sort of overlooked the most. But urinalysis to me is still one of the key components there because there’s so many things that will show up in the urine And that's actually pretty easy to test for it's relatively easy to collect the sample. And really that allows us to tell a lot about diabetes and kidney function, liver function, a lot of different things too. especially great for male cats and certainly for for other other pets as well.
And is it better for us to collect that before we come into the practice or have you guys get a fresh sample?
URINALYSIS AND STOOL SAMPLES
Depends a little bit if you're talking about urine explicitly, then sense a little bit on what the what we're looking for. This is something that we suspect there like a UTI, it's always better for us to collect those samples in the hospital, which have cleaner methods of collecting them. If we're just looking for kind of a routine monitoring, and that's something that can be collected at home, pretty easily collected at home and stored in an airtight container, in the refrigerator, put in the bag and put it in the fridge. many times that’s the less stressful way to do it, not nearly as clean. So if we're going to do this, we're looking for bacteria. That's not the ideal situation. But for routine monitoring that works very nicely.
And would the same go for a stool sample airtight in the frigerator. For how long? How long would it be good for?
Correct? Yeah, so the stool samples are a little bit less finicky about being refrigerated. And I always worried a little bit about things in store stool samples in the fridge where we make meals. That's always a hot topic. Interestingly, so long as they're not excessively hot, like I live in Phoenix, like It's brutally hot here. So we could keep them in an inside area with temperature control. And those samples are, usually good for a day or two, before they get to the clinic, or before they get to the lab. With some of the newer tests, we can actually still test them up to about a week out. And there's some great, there's some great new test techniques that we're using to give us really, really detailed results on samples that may not be as as fresh as we normally would like.
Okay, that's good to know. Before we take a sponsor break, would you both tell us the difference between what should not only a professional vet check look like? And how often, but what can we be doing at home? To monitor our dogs?
MONITORING OUR DOGS AT HOME
That's a great question. I think there's two components to that sort of stuff that we do the Veterinary Clinic and I'm under ideal circumstances, you'd see your veterinarian at least once a year, you'd see them you’d get a hands on exam, a physical exam, we actually get the hands on your pet. And that's so important, because we're gonna be able to look for things that are really something, you may not notice at home. We look for lymph node changes and abdominal pain and masses. And other things that may not be apparent to those of us who are just loving our pets at home. And so there's there's absolutely no substitute for that piece. That's really, really important. The things that we can do at home, there's a lot you can do, you can monitor for things like appetite changes, and frequency of urination, and thirst changes, those are really important things. You can also be checking. Sometimes it's difficult. We know in this day and age, it's very difficult to get in and see a veterinarian. there's simply not enough of us, not enough clinics, there's not enough appointments available. So the things that you can be doing in the meantime, you can actually run these tests at home, you can run a stool sample, a urine test, and in many cases a blood test at home. Not that you have to collect. There's some ways to do that. But you can do these tests at home. And they're a wonderful supplement for the six months between between your annual exams, you do it at six months, and now you've got a good checkin point, that you can get at least your veterinarian some data that they can work with. So it's not the same as a hands on visit. But they are getting some data that they can look at. So now instead of being a year between visits, only six months between having some contact with your vet.
I love it.
Well, I think to add to that, is there's certainly things you could do. For monitoring weight, you could get a pet scale, or you could just weigh yourself as well and and your pet, subtract the weight. Just to kind of monitor that. You could also making sure endurance. So if you're noticing that your pet, you know, we all want to play with our pet in the yard. So we're starting to see a little bit of the endurance going down. That's another thing to kind of watch for. So just being constantly. The helicopter parent, I would say is a good thing for pets because they can't tell us what's going on, unfortunately, and you are you as a pet parent have the best, best thing to do for them because you have your eyes. You see them every day, you're gonna see what they're doing. And if there's anything abnormal, there's something most likely going on. So it's always good to check.
Sure. Well, this brings up a good point in my mind, especially since COVID. You know, we relied on telehealth instead of in practice visits. And I know that telehealth is still going strong, in your opinion, isn't the best case scenario having a veterinarian with real eyes on, live on your dog versus trying to correspond via an online chat?
TELEHEALTH VISITS
Yeah, I think that's I think the answer to that, for me at least and certainly Dr. Joe might have a different feeling but I think for me the answer to that is it's not just a single solution. And so having veterinary clinics, we know that we're you know, we're under serving the population of pets up to 30% of veterinarians that we actually need, in many cases, and so getting appointments and getting in and getting the sort of hands on is not always or at least not as quickly as we need. And so there are many times where the telehealth component becomes a break. And that becomes a bridge of handling the things that that may not be necessarily urgent, or they just have simple questions that would otherwise take up an urgent appointment if they go to the vet’s. And so there really is a multiple sort of approach component here until at the veterinarian and there's no substitute for hands on an experienced doctor putting their hands on a pet and getting a full picture. There's no substitute. But in the meantime, when they can't make that happen, sometimes the vet can actually reduce the burden on the emergency room by simply having a telehealth doctor give an opinion. So I think that that's an important component to it. And certainly, we're very focused on the diagnostic space, we're having alternative ways of doing diagnostics that allow telehealth and the diagnostics to coordinate with the in person vet. now you have this perfect triad. We have a lot of people looking at your pet, as a profession with a lot of people looking at your pet, different opinions and different, you know, everybody looking at the same data point saying, hey, how do we keep them happy and healthy? That's our goal. So there's certainly areas where telehealth can be doesn't doesn't fit. But there's I think that's why all three need to work in concert.
Great point.
I would certainly second that.
Okay, perfect. Well, gentlemen, I am going to put you on hold for just a moment so that we can take a quick sponsor break and we will be right back.
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Hello, everybody. We are back with Dr. Rory and Dr. Joe having an amazing discussion. And why we need a baseline of information of our dog's health and what that means throughout their life. So now we're going to talk about the role of lab testing. And gentlemen, we talked about in the beginning, the importance of a fecal, a urinalysis, and blood work. So why don't you tell us about how lab testing has been done in the past and what you are doing to improve those diagnostics?
LAB TESTING
Great. Well, yeah, a little short history on some labs that are in medicine. There's a handful of veterinary labs that historically served all the veterinary hospitals in the US. And they, you know, they provide service and veterinarians can collect samples and send to the lab, and then the veterinarian receives a sample back results back and then they can review them, make some adjustments and interpretation, and then discuss with the pet parent about what they do with that. And that method has worked very, very well, for a long time, there wasn't as much information. Luckily, there wasn't as much information about why to test and when to test and what to test. And so that worked very well, because the veterinarian was a wonderful source of information for that and, and, and access to the lab tests. As we move into sort of kind of a 21st century approach, we look at all everything that's happening on the human side with kind of the quantified self and all that data, sort of the data that we're collecting on humans and ancestry stuff and the genetic testing and human access to lab work. We're finding that pet parents are really wanting to be able to check their, to monitor their their pet's health with more frequent testing than they may see at a vet’s. And so what we find is that, you know, we're recommending every three, six or potentially 12 months for lab testing as veterinarian, but we may not have appointments as frequently as our pet parents need. So what what we see in this is what we found is kind of the future of veterinary medicine is really this access to diagnostic care that is pet parent driven, so it's driven by the pet parent to want to do the best they can for their pets, they want to be able to participate in care. And that's such an important part. Nobody wants to be necessarily just told what to do, they want to participate. And that's where medicine is going. And so you know, having that access to care where you can just say, I want to get this testing done on my pet, between visits with the veterinarian. And I think that that's really where we're headed.
And that's what you guys are doing with Affordable Pet Labs. Right? How did that come to be?
AFFORDABLE PET LABS
So we started affordable pet labs in 2019, my team really with the idea that, that access to care is becoming more and more difficult and that access is costly. It's appointment times, and it's sort of availability. And physical access, sometimes people aren't able to get in, you know, maybe they have a stressed cat that they can't put in the box and don't want to drag to the vet every six months for lab work, or three months, if they're on thyroid meds God forbid, you know, they've got a 90 pound dog and they physically can't lift them in the car. that becomes an access to care problem. And so, you know, we tried to tackle these three things, the cost, availability and access, you know, in physical, physical proximity, by being able to bring some of that testing to the home. So really, what we're doing is we said look can we offer the same quality. So we're using the same reference lab quality that we use in the veterinary clinics, can we offer that same quality? But do it in the home? Can we bring experienced technicians to the home in a low stress environment? At a price that's affordable? So people can do it twice a year, once every year or every two years? Because it gets so expensive sometime? You know, can we do that in the home, low stress, lower costs, and same quality. And what we found is that we can we're able to offer that we're in 11 cities currently doing blood work, where we're able to do a whole host of bloodwork, almost everything we can do that you can do in the clinic, we can do in the home, we always send a pair of technicians don't expect anybody to draw their own pet’s blood. That's not That's not fair. Yeah, exactly. That would be stressful. And we don't even expect you to hold your pet like we send two technicians always want to make sure that they've got that they're, you know, they're able to have a good experience. And then you know, and then we expanded that said, Look, you know, we can we also know that we can do urine and fecal testing, stool testing for worms, we can do that really easily through the mail nationwide. So we have these entire kits that have everything you need to collect a urine sample and a stool sample you use or, and then you send it back to us and you get the results in a couple of days. then we share that with your vet. And we share all those results with the veterinarian so that they have the results, you have the results as the pet parent. And now there can be a discussion around here's what we do next. Here's what this means.
Well, I wanted to reiterate, one thing that we are really trying to focus on is sharing the results with the pet parent as well. I do feel like sometimes in the clinic, world, we're so worried about the next pet that maybe getting sick, you don't share enough of that information out there. So one thing that as Affordable Pet Labs, we're trying hard to do is change the industry where we can actually have it where pet parents get to participate in the health of their pet. So they get the information with them so they could review it and have questions. We want those questions to be asked in those exams so that you as a pet parent get to understand what's going on as well.
Yeah, and I think that's really, we're at the stage now in with technology and everything that you have Dr. Google and which is helpful for a little bit. But what we really want is, have that connection with your veterinarian with these results. Ask those questions because your veterinarian can relay more personalized information about your pet to you. So Dr. Google is great for a quick Hey, what does this mean? But your veterinarian will be able to give that? Well, what we're seeing in the past here are the values and this is what we see. And this is why we are concerned or we're not concerned. So that's the stuff that's really what I'm excited about?
Right. Well, and to your point in the beginning, so crucial to have the baseline for your own dog to see what is normal and abnormal for them. Well, since you guys are doing blood draws I know when we first met, I brought this up, are you able to do titer testing as well?
TITER TESTING
So if you look at sort of a whole host of all lab testing that’s available, there's probably only about half a dozen things that we can't or won't do. And those are things that we firmly believe should be done in the veterinary clinic. Outside of that, titer testing for vaccines and for infectious diseases. Probably makes up, I would say I haven’t taken a look at the numbers recently, but I would say probably makes up 25 or 30% of our of our work right now. Because it's such an important component of monitoring.
And why not go through you because I know at least what titers, everybody has to send those out. There isn’t a practice that just can do that in house.
Couldn't agree more. The one thing that we're titer testing for, we just don't do the export titer testing, that's something that you would need to go in through your veterinarian so that they can perform the physical exam so that they can create the health paper that would be required for travel. But if it's just for Hey, what's my dog's rabies values? Or parvo.
Didn't you guys tell me that you also work with rescues on the blood panels?
WORKING WITH RESCUES
We do. And I was hoping we would definitely talk about that. So what we have right now is and for the future is our heartstrings are going towards those rescues. And we know a lot of pets are actually not getting homes, because as a potential pet parent, we might just not know how the health is in the pet so or so to help get more get pets more homes is that we are working on with with rescues to provide a discount service, where rescues will get a 20% discount off of all of our tests, there is a quick little form you have to fill out this to make sure that you are a rescue. But we it's the same process where they just go onto our website, apply. And then once they get that just unique discount code, all the rescue for the life of that rescue will get a discount whenever they purchase through us. And we are also working with a different couple groups on trying to get more involved with the shelters as well so so that we can help them as well save money so that they could put more of that money towards the health and the care of those animals. But then also, hopefully share those records with the pet owner or pet parent when they actually adopt, that animal so they already have a little package together. And there's the baseline that we talked about. But now for a pet that you may not have known previously.
What a great program. That's awesome.
Such an important part of our commitment to the community to make sure that we're actually we're actually helping community not just not just providing service to pet parents, but also to future pet parents.
Right. Well, before we sign off today, gentlemen, we all love stories, because we can relate to those. are there any stories that come to your minds as far as somebody that did do the at home testing at Affordable Pet Labs? And what was the outcome? The before the after?
Yeah, I'll go. So interestingly, this is kind of specific for Phoenix, but there's a disease called Valley fever. And really what we have found is a couple examples that came up to my mind and just right now is we've had a couple rescue groups, people reaching out to rescue groups, saying, Hey, I don't know what's going on with my pet. And we've had those rescue groups referring, hey, just get your pet tested for valley fever. It sounds like this. Through Affordable Pet Labs. Well, we had one individual that I can remember really, and they were concerned about this other dog and of course, we'd be very concerned if it started showing signs of sickness and everything. Well, our what we did is we went out and had our tech, go and do the collection. And one of the things that was interesting is that we noticed with this value that like hey, this was our CBC chem, let's add something to that, because we know that your pet is not feeling well. Some of the values on the CBC counts look routine. But there's some elevation on some others. But what we could do is let's add a valley fever test to this. And we added it, we got the results in two days, and the pet was positive for valley fever. And pretty much from there, their pet parent was super excited because they had an answer. And then they were able to go to their veterinarian where this is that connection that we really want with, that we love to have with veterinarians is that we share those records with them, they were able to get the treatment going. And the animal’s doing much better. Now, because we found that there was that additional thing that needed to be added to that test. We're just reviewing those results. So and that's knowing that there's something wrong, but then getting that testing done is so important. It's going to help those tests in the long run.
Great example. Wow. Yay. I like happy endings.
We do too.
Yes, of course, you obviously both of you are so passionate. And we are so grateful for you, Dr. Joe and Dr. Rory, where can everyone find out more information about you and Affordable Pet Labs?
Yeah, that's a real easy search. Google search is AffordablePetLabs.com. We are in multiple states. We also have the collection kits that you can order online. And really just if you have a rescue, or anyone that is interested in getting the discount program, let us know. they are on this website, there's a form that you could just contact us and we could chat with you. Usually, it's some of the times it's Rory and I on the chat, kind of talking with pet parents to find out what's going on. But then we do have the rescue application there. So website, Facebook, social media, all those places. We're constantly monitoring and trying to help people out. So just look up Affordable Pet Labs.
Social Media URLs or Tags
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/affordablepetlabsandservices/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/affordablepetlabs
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/affordable-pet-labs/?viewAsMember=true
Wonderful. And I'll put all of these links in the show notes for everybody. Before we end this very informative interview. Do either of you have anything you'd like to leave us with?
No, I think I really appreciate the opportunity to chat about the importance of diagnostics and routine monitoring. So we can start treatment as early as possible. If we do find something hopefully we don't. But certainly if we do, it's nice to be able to start treatment early. So I'm I'm excited to be able to continue the discussion around around how we keep them healthy. And how do we want to monitor so this is really exciting.
Start the discussion. That's what we do. Well, thank you both so much. We really appreciate it. And everybody check out AffordablePetLabs.com
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