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New dog owner - vet question

1117 Views 10 Replies 9 Participants Last post by  poodleholic
Hello,

we adopted a 11 week-old puppy a couple of weeks ago and went to a vet with her this past week for a puppy exam.

I did not feel very comfortable after leaving. First off, they did a fecal test and found out that she has worms. We were given some pills for her and they also told us to start her on heartworm prevention, gave us a 1-month free sample of Sentinel.
I did some research and found out that you should not start your dog on heartworm prevention until the dog was tested for it. They did not test her though and still told us to start the pills. :confused:
We did not give her the pill yet and are thinking about switching to another vet.
Another thing is that the technician was talking to us about how to housetrain our dog and after we told her that we are not crate training she basically told us we are not doing it correctly then and that dogs her age can hold it for about 8 hours! She is only 3 months old so i always thought they can only hold it the number of months they are plus one??

What do you guys think?
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Why go to another vet simply because he didn't test for heartworm? Neither did MY vet, for the same reason stated below:

It takes 6 months after infection with HW for adult worms to appear. So an 11 week old puppy can't have them. Heartworm meds kill any pre-adult worm larva in the dog, so if the puppy was infected at 11 weeks (very rare, but possible) it's totally okay to give them medication for it. HW Tests can ONLY detect adult worms, so it's pointless to test that young of a pup.

The vet tech was rude, and gave inaccurate information. Let your vet know what she said, and how you felt about it, and request a different tech during your visits.
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