Disease, injury, and even hereditary factors can affect the health of your dog or cat’s internal organs, such as the heart, lungs, intestines, kidneys, pancreas, and so on. Being located inside a dog or cat’s body, problems occurring in these internal organs often don’t become visible until they reach advanced stages.
Veterinary internal medicine is concerned with the care and treatment of your pet’s internal organs. This task is facilitated by an array of tools designed to enable a veterinarian to examine your dog or cat’s internal organs without having to resort to surgically opening your pet’s body.
These tools include:
- In-house laboratory—Our in-house laboratory allows us to analyze and obtain test results quickly.
- Electrocardiography —An EKG machine is used to measure a pet’s heart.
- Ultrasound —Ultrasound is a tool that allows us to observe and save a video of how various internal organs are functioning.
- Endoscopy —Endoscopy is a tool for photographing and obtaining samples of interior areas of intestines and other tissues.
- Radiology (X-ray)—X-rays allow us to see images of the internal organs and structures in your pet’s body without surgical intervention.
All of these tools and others, while providing information about what is happening inside your pet’s body, are non-invasive and generally don’t cause pain or require an anesthetic.
The veterinarians and staff at Seven Hills Veterinary Hospital have the training, experience, equipment, and other resources needed to keep your pet healthy and active. These diagnostic tests give us several valuable pieces of information to diagnose your pet’s health problems.
However, many internal problems lack external signs until they reach an advanced stage. In addition, your pet is usually unable to alert, describe, or vocalize the fact that he or she is ill or in pain.
This is why we encourage our pet owners to schedule twice-yearly pet wellness visits so that we can examine the pets and treat any internal problems early. With early diagnosis and treatment, we can often detect and cure problems before visible symptoms occur.