Dog Care - Eye Drops, Wash, and Ointments

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Hi, I am Dr. Candy Olson from Greenbriar Animal Hospital. We're making a video on tips for how to care for your dog at home. This is Molly; she is going to be helping us out this section. This is about how to do eye medication for your dog, eye drops, eye ointment and how to clean your dog's eyes. There are couple of important tips here. One of the things is whatever you're doing in your dog's eye, dogs get a little scared if you come out right in their face. So it helps to come out from behind a little bit. The other thing is when you're doing something like this; you're going to be real careful not to touch the tip of the bottle to anything. So rather than come out like this, what I am going to do is rest my hand on her head here and I am just going to pull back, just a little bit, so that it opens her eye and I am going to let it drop from far away. I know these bottles are little but there is plenty of drops in there. So if she moves, that way your hand moves with her. If you're doing this and she suddenly looks up, you are not going to contaminate the bottle or poke her in the eye accidentally but also she doesn't really see it coming very much. Dogs have a tear duct that runs down into the nose, so right now she is doing a lot of licking that's because those drops just went straight down into the inside of her nose. Since it tastes kind of funny, doesn't it? Now if you are cleaning your dog's eyes, the best kind of thing to use to clean the dog, these little disposable, one use eye drop thing that you can get for pupils. The idea is you are not just putting drops in the eye you are actually rinsing it out. So you want to squeeze the whole thing into the eye. Again it helps a little bit, if you come at it from behind. So we're just going to do this and we're going squeeze it all in, that's going to run right in and right back out. And then you want to just gently blot the eye, couple of times. She probably is going to lick a lot for that. Some dogs will actually sneeze afterwards. If you want to, if there is a little bit of goo in the corner of the eye, it's best to just use your finger or you can take a tissue again and just kind of wipe it around your finger. You have to be real careful here. Because it's very easy to irritate the eye, you want to be real careful. But you're just going along the skin and not on the edge of the eyelid itself. Because if you get just a little tiny bit of that tissue, Kleenex tissue in the eye itself, you can cause a scrape and irritation. The last thing that we're going to show you in this section is how to do eye ointment. Eye ointment is lot harder to do. It's difficult to master. You got to be real close in the eye. It's very easy to touch the tip to the eye, and it's really important not to. So it helps to practice it a little bit. The idea is you're going to squeeze this out and a little bit is going to come out. You want a piece about a half inch long, and you got to wait. Eventually, sometimes it shake a little bit and then it's going to fall off. So you can see you got to have a cooperative dog to be able to do this. Usually the directions will call for like a quarter or a half inch piece in the eye. Again it helps to do this coming from behind. So what we're going to do is we're going to squeeze out a little piece here and we're just going to let it touch the eye and we're going to wait for it to fall off. Sometimes you have to wait. The other thing that you want to do is you want to rub it just a little bit, because that tends to help spread it around. So it gets nicely coated. It is important to not touch the tip of this to anything either, so notice where I just held it while I was doing that. The other thing that you can do is you can have your tissue here. So that once you put it in the eye you can set it down there but again you don't even want to touch the tissue, so the best thing to do is just to keep holding it while you're doing that. Or if you happen to have another person there that's the ideal time to say here, hang on to this for me. So that's how to do eye drops, eye wash and eye ointment for your dog. The one thing is, if the dog is not cooperative and is jumping all over, it's possible to do eye drops, it's not possible to do eye ointment and you might find that you waste a lot of the drops. Putting two or three dogs face whenever you wanted that you get in the eye. So if you have troubles with your dog in getting near the face and your veterinarian wants to prescribe medication for the eyes, that's for drops rather than ointment. Even if they have to be put in more often, it's more likely that you will be getting them in the dog's eye. So next we're going to cover how to do ear mites for dogs and we'll cover that in a minute.

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