If your dentist is like mine, he does more than just have his technician scale and polish your teeth. His job is to enter the room afterward to assess not just the X-rays and the teeth but, according to the American Dental Association’s newer guidelines, your mouth as a whole. If you’re lucky, that might even include an oral cancer screening.
The best dentists are thorough! So, too, are their veterinary counterparts. After all, there’s more to oral health in pets than managing periodontal disease.
Tough to Examine
Unfortunately, pets tend to be squirrelly about having their mouths opened — much less thoroughly probed. And as much as we may urge pet owners to start brushing their pet's teeth early on, it’s still the unusual owner who manages to train their pets to surrender complete oral submission. Enter anesthesia. Just ask any veterinarian and they’ll confess: There’s no going without if what you want is a thorough examination.
Whether or not you need convincing, this post aims to show you that when mouths go unchecked, pets can suffer in silence from all kinds of painful and serious oral conditions, most of which can’t be a) evaluated or diagnosed properly in the absence of anesthesia and b) treated without it. And many of them go way beyond the garden-variety gingivitis and periodontal disease you may be familiar with.
Oral Conditions Best Caught Early
To help prove my point, I’ve recruited a bunch of common oral conditions that fall into the category of a) painful and b) better off treated earlier than later — most of which demand a complete oral examination.
1. Dental fractures.
2. Feline resorptive lesions. This fancy term applies to very(!) painful lesions that cats tend to suffer at the gumline. Because they often occur at the junction between the root and the crown of a tooth, these cavity-like lesions are sometimes covered by tartar or obscured by gingivitis, which makes them especially hard to identify.
3. Retained roots. In many cases (very commonly in cats who suffer resorptive lesions), catastrophic dental fractures can lead to roots retained beneath the gums. It’s a big deal, since these roots are often painfully infected.
