How to Treat Vomiting in Dogs

My name is Sam Meisler and I am a small animal veterinarian. Let’s talk about dog vomiting.

Now, this is a very general symptom and there are a lot of things that can cause a dog to vomit. From you know the most common things what we call a dietary indiscretion or your pet gets into something that it shouldn’t and it has stomach upset or medically known as gastritis or gastroenteritis. It can get a gastroenteritis just from eating even table foods and things like that. Diseases like pancreatitis, pancreatitis can cause intense pain in the abdomen and vomiting and that is caused by an over stimulation of the pancreas.

There are diseases that are not as serious like bile reflux disease where bile is normally dump into the small intestine and go downstream but on a an empty stomach they come upstream and cause nausea and that’s solved sometimes by just feeding warm meals during the day.

There are more serious causes of vomiting in young dogs we always worry about an obstruction. I take out a lot of articles at clothing from dog stomachs and intestines during their first couple years of life. And that is why it is so important to protect your clothing and protect your dog from getting into trouble.

There are of course lots and lots of other causes of dog vomiting and sometimes liver disease, sometimes kidney disease can cause vomiting. In older dogs, we’re always worried about cancer raising its ugly head and other diseases like that.

What I usually do for a vomiting dog is has a minimum data base, I want to take x rays of the abdomen and I want to do some basic blood work to see if we can rule out kidney, liver disease, pancreatitis, that sort of thing. X-rays sometimes will pick up an obstruction, sometimes not but those are kind of the basic things we want to do. Always we want to do a fecal to check for intestinal parasites to make sure they are not the cause of vomiting.

There are some more specific tests that we can do. As we get into the diagnosis of vomiting, it becomes a little bit more complicated. But that gives you some ideas of kind of what we’re looking at when a dog presents for vomiting.


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