Our Services > Wellness Testing
Wellness Testing
When you bring your pet in for routine visits, you may be asked if you are interested in wellness testing. These are tests that are done on pets that don't really have any severe health problems that have been identified previously.
Why do these sort of tests? There are several reasons we may want to do tests on animals that don't appear to be sick. Experts have shown that more that 20 percent of seemingly-healthy animals actually do have some problem that hasn't been identified previously just by observation. Unfortunately, we can't always ask our pets how they are feeling and don't have that way of getting information.
Subtle signs of a problem may be missed and so we rely on wellness testing to help us screen for problems in addition to recognizing signs of illness. Early identification of many problems gives us the chance to address them before your animal gets gravely ill with the problem. Some things can be addressed with diet or simple changes that don't involve lots of drugs and such.
The information we get from simple blood and urine tests can be used as baseline values to refer back to when there is a question of health in the future. We also use the wellness testing as pre-anesthetic blood work, if a procedure is planned in the near future, to help identify any problems that may have an impact on anesthesia for the procedure.
There are also some common drugs that many animals are on that need blood and urine tests to monitor their level or the status of health of the liver, kidneys and other organs.
If you are interested in learning more about what wellness tests that may benefit your animal, please be sure to ask us.