Skin & Flea Care
Spring heralds the start of skin problems for pet dogs and cats, and we hope the following advice will help your pet avoid the dreaded "itch" and remain in the best of health.

The main problems of the warmer months are flea-related skin problems and spring allergies.

Fleas transmit the tapeworm and spring is a perfect time to worm out your pets. We recommend Endoguard, a palatable and cost-effective method for treating all worms. Worm treatments must be repeated tri-monthly.

Frontline Plus is the latest generation Spot-On flea control product. We recommend a once a month application to the back of the neck to control fleas and flea-allergies. Frontline Plus applied each second week is also effective in preventing ticks. The tick season starts now until next April.

The combination of a weekly bath, monthly Frontline Plus and three-monthly Endoguard will leave your pet sensationally healthy.

Please talk to us about these products when you bring your pet in for its annual vaccination. You may also like to phone us to discuss any of these products further.

Skin Health Programme

On the following program, your pet's coat will become unbelievably shiny and healthy.

Weekly Shampoo: Flea Drop (Neem) Monthly Flea Control: Frontline Plus Tri-Monthly: Intestinal Worm, including Tapeworm - Endoguard

Dr. Rob Marshall's Approach to Difficult Skin Problems
The exact cause of skin irritation in dogs and cats require extra help from tests such as skin scrapings, skin biopsy or blood serum allergy tests, because most skin diseases have itchiness as the main symptom.

The skin biopsy is best taken early, because as the skin disease progresses, the biopsy results become less specific.

We prefer to take the skin biopsy under a short-acting general anaesthetic rather than a local anaesthetic so that your pet is less distressed by this simple procedure.

The skin biopsy identifies the skin condition as allergic (and categorises the allergy into atop, food, flea or contact allergies) or due to bacterial, fungal, mites or cancer causes.

The skin biopsy helps to eliminate the need of long term cortisones to alleviate itchiness in the dog with skin disease.

When the biopsy indicates atopy in the pet dog, we recommend a serum blood test be taken to identify the exact allergic substances.

Our aim is to identify the exact cause of the skin disease early so that long-term use of cortisone-type drugs is avoided where possible.

Copyright © 2005 Rob Marshall, All Rights Reserved.