The Benefits to you and your pet of Pre-Surgical Blood Testing:

Just like in human medicine, we strongly recommend pre-surgical blood testing. This is to ensure the safety and better overall health of your pet.

The blood tests we run in a "pre-anesthetic mini panel test" check for your pets red and white blood cell levels, as well as certain biochemistry evaluations for basic liver, kidney, protein levels and more. We want to be certain that all these values are within normal limits for your pet.

Why do pre-surgical blood tests? Major studies run by professional veterinary specialists have shown that as many as 1 in 10 pets that otherwise appear normal have significant blood changes that can indicate medical conditions needing further evaluation and treatment before any anesthesia and surgery. Conditions such as early unknown kidney disease, liver disease, anemia (low red blood cell counts), or hidden infections, and many others can be found with just a simple blood test.

If such conditions exist, they can interfere with how your pet handles, or recovers from, the anesthetics and the surgical procedures we might use. If we find any such abnormal results we can often preemptively treat your pet to have a safer, healthier time with us, or alter our anesthetic or surgical protocols to better ensure your pets speedy, strong recovery.

Another great benefit is that pre-surgical blood results give us a "baseline" of information that we can refer to in the future to better evaluate any changes we might find as your pet ages.

As well, by doing preoperative blood testing a few days in advance of the day of your pets procedure we save time and become more efficient with less kennel waiting for your pet on the day of their procedure; and, if we do find abnormalities, we can deal with them even sooner, often avoiding having to cancel a procedure on the day of surgery.

We appreciate your attention to this information and wish you the best health for your pet!

Yours sincerely,

The Health Care Team at Healing Traditions Holistic Veterinary Clinic