June 4, 2025 –
Thank you to Midtown Veterinary Medical Center for guest writing this blog, as part of a sponsorship program. To learn more, visit midtownvmc.com.
It’s that time of year again. You get the notification from your veterinarian that your pet is due for their annual exam. But your pet has been healthy all year long, why should you go?
Even apparently healthy animals should see their veterinarian at least once a year. This is called preventative medicine, and the focus of this practice is to keep your pet healthy. Preventative medicine includes discussing your pet’s individual needs, boosting annual vaccines, prescribing preventative medications, and performing lab tests to identify illness early. Preventative medicine also includes – perhaps most importantly, a physical examination.
If you have ever wondered how veterinarians discover what is wrong with your pet, despite their inability to tell us where it hurts, a large part of the answer is physical examination. A physical examination involves taking a close look at your pet’s entire body from nose to tail, and veterinarians are trained in how to do this methodically.
Not only can a thorough physical exam help answer the question “what is wrong with my pet?” but it can also help identify an illness you may not be aware your pet is experiencing. Pets can often hide their health problems from loved ones so that you do not notice the mass in the mouth, the creaky joints from arthritis pain, or the broken tooth. Annual physical exams and appropriate lab tests performed by your veterinarian ensure that problems such as these are found early so that your pets can get back to their best healthy selves and live longer.
So, the physical examination was normal, vaccines were boosted, parasite testing was negative. Why should you do that bloodwork? Unfortunately, even well-trained veterinarians can’t get a look at the internal organs on exam alone. Bloodwork helps complete the picture by evaluating the function of your pet’s blood, immune system, liver, kidneys, and more. Performing bloodwork yearly allows veterinarians to evaluate trends and identify changes before your pet is physically sick. In combination with the exam, it is like putting pieces of a puzzle together. One piece alone won’t tell you everything but once you put it all together and you can see the landscape.
So, if your pet is healthy and you are thinking “why should I go,” the answer is: to keep them healthy.
