Spring Events

Your Local Vet Events

There’s always something going on at Mancelona Veterinary Hospital. Make sure to mark your calendar with our upcoming events so you don’t miss out.

Annual Heartworm Testing and Preventive Screening

At Mancelona Veterinary Hospital we keep you updated about the most current veterinary profession recommendations regarding the care of your pet. The American Animal Hospital Association (AAHA) has made a few new recommendations that we feel make good sense for your pet’s health and are not too costly to have done.

The first recommendation is yearly heartworm checks. We have begun using a test that not only checks your pet for heartworm but it also detects Lyme Disease and two other tick-causing diseases, Anaplasmosis and Ehrlichia. With winters becoming less severe, ticks are flourishing in Northern Michigan, and unfortunately, they are exposing some of our pets to the diseases they carry. With this new heartworm test, we will be able to scan for these diseases before your pet begins to show symptoms and suffer from the chronic illnesses they can cause.

Our pets are like infants. They can’t tell us if they are feeling under the weather or in pain. That is until the condition is severe enough that they begin to exhibit symptoms that we can see. Unfortunately, by that time, your pet has progressed to the point that treatment is more expensive, and its health could be severely compromised. To get a better idea of what is going on inside your pet and potentially head off problems before they reach this point, we recommend a preventive health care screen.

These are lab tests that examine the overall health of your pet’s internal organs and individual blood levels. By finding undesirable changes early in the disease’s process, we can often take steps to slow down or even reverse it. Your veterinarian and technician will go over our recommendations regarding the best panel of tests for your individual pet based on its breed, age, and lifestyle.