The Adventures in Vet Bills saga that I started in “Healthy American dog runs up a larger health care bill than a slightly sick Mexican” continues…
After nearly four years of life, Mindy the Crippler needed her teeth cleaned. It cost $2,000. I don’t think that the clinic here in exurban Boston is overpriced because there was a two-month waiting list to get in.
Anesthesia, including necessary prior bloodwork, was nearly $1,000.
The specialist vet said “Be sure to bring her back every year.” If we did that, not only would the poor golden retriever have to spend a full day in the hospital once per year, but our spending on vet care would be roughly 3X what it is now.
Humans in San Diego who don’t have dental insurance will go across the border to get their dental care in Mexico. A Boston friend rejected a car-sized quote for dental procedures and had U.S.-trained professors of dentistry do the work in Costa Rica while he enjoyed a vacation. Why can’t dogs travel to Cancun or Tamarindo in January and enjoy the beach with one day off for canine dentistry?
Hmm… Last year, I took my border collie in for teeth cleaning, and the whole cost, including anesthesia, was a few hundred dollars. This is in Iowa.
Might be an easier trip for some people than Cancun, even if not as tropical!
Do you understand that you can get a beef bone (the spongy part) for basically nothing and get the same results? is Mindy too refined for that?
I take it back — for $1000 I will take care of Mindy for an afternoon and clean her teeth with an all-natural secret remedy that does not involve risky anesthesia.
Dogs don’t need to have their teeth cleaned. They just need the right diet and some crunchy things to scrape off whatever shouldn’t be there. Anesthesia for a human being in SE PA was about $700 last time I checked.
Trevis: Do you mind sharing the invoice details and contact info for your vet? It really was done for just a few hundred? I would go to Iowa for that!
paddy: Mindy gets chews and “greenie”-style teeth cleaners, but she was developing some visible tartar and, um, breath issues. I have never seen a dog that didn’t need at least some dentistry to prevent bad breath by age 7.
Federico: Mindy is extremely refined!
The fact that there was a two month waiting listvdoesn’t mean it can’t be overpriced. After all, service quality is pretty opaque, a lot of people wouldn’t want to take the cheapo vet, even if they provided exactly the same outcome.
Chewing rawhides, pig ears, and uncooked bones (cooked = sharp fragments) can clean dog teeth. Fed these to my sister’s dog while she vactioned, she remarked how much cleaner her dog’s teeth were after 2 weeks.
Folks: Are you sure that the “dogs don’t need a dentist” ideas make sense? We brush our teeth and floss at least once per day, right? And we still get our teeth/gums cleaned by a professional every six months. Admittedly we are trying to keep our teeth going for a lot longer than a dog’s lifespan, but I don’t think we can go from “every six months” to “never”, especially when humans are so much better about brushing their own teeth than they are about brushing pets’ teeth.
No animals other than humans brush their teeth and no animals other than some humans and some of their pampered pets see a dentist. Nonetheless many species of animals have been on the planet for eons and if they had no teeth they couldn’t eat and would disappear. So it it at least questionable whether good dentistry affects longevity. As for flossing, i read somewhere that there is not a single peer reviewed article showing that an individual flossing accomplishes anything because it is not physically possible for an individual to floss properly — as opposed to a hygienist flossing while the patient is titled back in a chair. A lot of medicine, in particular dentistry, seems to emphasize fault rather than randomness and genetics. I bet that in the future this will all seem quite primitive — like if you try really hard you can make it to heaven.
In NC we seem to have a shortage of vets. We only have one vet school. My vet could afford to give $3 million to the local university when he was about 55. But he’s a good vet and he does work hard.
A side dental story. A few years back my car broke down. The tow truck driver was an Egyptian dentist from Cairo. I had just gotten a dental implant that cost over $5000. He said that in Cairo it probably would have cost around $500. He said he and his buddies always defer their dental work until a return trip to Egypt where it is a fraction of the cost.
FYI, he said he could not practice dentistry in the U.S. without undergoing several more years of schooling.
Given the cost difference beteeen dentistry in the US vs Mexico, Costa Rica, Egypt, etc. it seems like insurance companies here are overpaying for dental work and bidding up the price in the US?
On a somewhat related note… What percentage of the planes at your local airport are owned by dentists? It seems like an above average percentage of owners of above average planes I encounter are dentists.
I give my border collie green teeth cleaning chews (roughly) daily, and she has a light teeth brushing every six weeks when getting her hair trimmed. As Philip described, after a few years, even with all of that, visible buildup on her teeth warranted an exhaustive cleaning.
Philip: I reviewed last year’s invoice. The whole cost for dental cleaning, anesthesia, the whole process, came to about $445. The vet clinic I have used for about 25 years is at:
http://animalcarehospital.org/
Thanks, Trevis! Everyone should move to Iowa (well, maybe check http://www.realworlddivorce.com/Iowa first…).
Anonymous: Are there are a lot of dentists at our airport? I can’t remember any. Doctors and engineers/programmers seem to be our most common demographic for airplane owners. Also people in financial services, including venture capital and private equity. Among the renters we have all kinds of careers represented, but, again, I can’t think of a dentist.
Phil, people need to brush teeth because our diets are not designed for our teeth, nor our teeth are designed for a lifespan much past the age of 30. In the past (3000 or more years ago) people ate hard food that keep teeth straight, had little or no sugar, and few cereals (they did in fact eat carbs, and nobody ever did paleo until a few years ago, but the carb bombs that cereals are were not an everyday occurrence) and thus very rare cavities. Egyptian mummies show that a lot of people died because they had worn down their teeth so much they got infections from them — yet no dentist was required aside from doing extractions.
Thanks to the magic of the interwebz you can check how long dogs in rural ares live and how much dentistry they get. Do the same exercise for hunting dogs (used for hunting!), or countries where people do not waste money like in the US.
Phil, uncooked bone is pretty abrasive and works damn well. I have no idea if modern suburban Americans in the land of Millionaires feed that stuff to their dogs. There is a risk — bones are both food and toy, and dogs can get pretty aggressive defending bones. Unless you have a properly socialised dog — i.e. you are the pack leader, and every human in the family ranks above the pooch — bites might occur.
Actually, as I wrote the above I do see now why people shell $$$ in Millionaires’ land to get their dogs’ teeth cleaned, rather than doing what every damn farmer can without spending money for a dog training class and a dog dentist.
That does sound a little high, but dogs do need anesthesia. Did she need a bunch of extractions or anything?
superMike: She had “resorbed” the roots of a few small teeth behind her big front canines so these four had to be removed (they were a little loose). These were verified with X-rays that I was including in the cost of the cleaning (they do it as routine). But the $2,000 number was before the cost of the extractions (about $300 additional).
Federico: I wouldn’t worry about bites from this dog (well, sometimes she does grab me by the wrist and I must fight the urge to shout out “hashtag Me Too”), but I am still not convinced that chewing on a bone can clean every tooth and under the gum area that corresponds to every tooth. Wouldn’t the bone-chewing mostly clean the bigger and stronger teeth?
Phil, what is stopping you from waiting 6 months from the current tooth cleaning, buying a spongy bone and feeding it to Mindy (pro tip: if you can find an Italian or Spanish style ham bone Mindy will seriously love it)? you can have an empirical answer to all your questions. You can even repeat the ministration to see if there is a dose dependant effect! The cost would be ~0, and if you are not happy you can shell out another 2K.
My wife is a vet. She’d tell you that cleaning teeth is necessary and should cost on the order of $400 to $500. As the husband of a vet, if your vet can charge $2000 that sounds pretty awesome! We need to set up practice in your neighborhood. But as a consumer, you should find a different vet. Note that a good chunk of that cost is anesthesia. A cost that you typically don’t have when cleaning human teeth because humans will sit still when told. Well, most of them will anyway.