How to Treat Ear Mites in Dogs

My name is Sam Meisler and I’m a small animal veterinarian. In this segment, let’s talk about dog ear mites.

Ear mite seems to be the number one misdiagnosis that I see in my hospital. Everyone who brings their dog in for an ear infection seemed to think that it’s caused by ear mites. Now, ear mites are quite common out there but they are easily diagnosed with the otoscope. The otoscope has a magnifying glass on it, it’s only a 10X magnifying glass but with that magnifying glass otoscope, you can actually see ear mites. There will be a little white speck moving around in the ear canal. Now, they tend to produce a kind of a black brown discharge which is like basically dried up clog that the ear mite has been chewing on but they are easily seen with an otoscope and if you don’t see them, if your veterinarian does not see them, it’s not ear mites.

The best thing to do when you think your dog has an ear infection is to take it to your veterinarian, have them do an otoscopic examination where they look at the ear drum, ear canal with and otoscope and they can tell directly whether you have ear mites or not.

Now often, we do a swab as well pretty on a slide with a little mineral oil so you can actually see the ear mites which is kind of fun to see these little guys crawling around. Ear mite treatment has gotten a lot better than it was in the past. It used to be you have to—your drops which you can still do but now there is a treatment that you put on topically, you put on the back of the neck area, it is actually a high one preventive. You put it on at the back of the neck area and within a couple weeks the ear mites would be gone. Sometimes you have to double it up with doing a second follow up treatment a month later. But nowadays that is the treatment of choice, you do not have to do ear drops. Once you’ve got the ear mites treated then I usually follow up a couple weeks later with doing the ear cleaning to get all the junk out.


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