Dog Care - Ear Medication

Hi I am Dr. Candy Olson, at Greenbriar Animal Hospital. We are making videos for tips for ways you take care of your dog at home. This particular section is on doing ear medication This is Tufley, she's going to be helping us out here. There are couple of important things about putting ear medication in your dog that you want to be aware of. One is that a lot of times when you are putting medicine in your dog's ear, it's uncomfortable so, or may be downright painful. So you want to be as gentle as you can but your veterinarian wouldn't have prescribed the medication, if it wasn't important. So if you're finding that your dog is not cooperating and you can't get medication in, call your vet and ask for a different form. There are a lot of different forms for these medications. Occasionally, we mix up a special medication that's very liquid and you measure with a syringe and just squirt it, so it runs right down the ear. It's not as good a medication, you have to use it for lot longer but sometimes, something special like that may be what's needed. The other thing is when you looking at the dog's ear, what you looking at is a up at the top here, there's the hole there's the opening, but in dog Tufley's size that opening goes down to about here, little bit more than an inch. Then it makes it almost right angle turn and goes in about another half an inch to where the ear drum is, so you have got this cone, that's getting narrower and turning, and it's all a dead end. So when you are putting medication in, you want to make it sure that the medication is -- there's enough in there to coat that whole area and get all the way down there.

So just a few drops isn't going to be enough, well, if you had a three pound Chihahuah, a few drops might get down there. But the bigger the dog the bigger the ear the more medication you are going to need and so some imes that's another issue that helps. The third part about putting medication in a dog's ear is a lot of times, you don't really get to measure it. Most of the time you are filling up the ear you are putting in a good squirt or something that, so am going to show you a way to judge, did you get enough medication in. Without having to guess and without having to measure that's really helpful. Most ear medication come in two forms, this is a more liquid drop and I am just going to put a drop on the tissue here, so you can see what it looks like, it's clear and it's just little bit thick, it's pretty liquid, it looks a little bit like clear karo syrup.

This other stuff that we'll show you in a minute it's our greasier ointment, it's also fairly liquid. But you can see that it's just hard to tell, how much do you put in the ear? So the way you do this is, you're going to want to sort of fold the ear over, you can see, and you just put this in and you just give a good squirt. We're not measuring at the top. And then what we are going to do is we are going to massage this part and where we are doing our massaging and rubbing is down below the ear opening, down here where that tube went down and turned. And the idea is that after you do this rubbing, little after about 30 seconds or so if you got enough stuff in there it starts to squish and make noises. That's what you want to hear. Now, some other ear medications, that we going to put this other one in the other ear for her, so you can see, will have a nozzle on it like this and the reason for that is these medications aren't just liquid, so what happens with them is if you just put them at the top, there are never going to get all the way down to the bottom.

And this tends to place the medication about halfway, so that it's down there and some of it will come up and some of it will go down but the thing is her eardrum, if you were to put this at the top of the ear. Her eardrum is way down here. So there's no reason to worry about, you're going to hit something or you going to hurt her by slipping this into the ear, but again you are doing it blind. So you are going to this same kind of thing. That's right, you're just going to slip this in and you are going to give a squeeze.

This stuff by the way looks about the same as the other stuff and then before you let it go, you are going to do your massaging thing. The last thing that you know can do to it make sure is if you look after you put the medication and you get a little squishy sound, the inside of the ear should look little shiny and that let's you know again, okay, you got it down, you got it all in, and you are done. Most of the time, if you are putting ear medicine in the ear, you shouldn't be cleaning the ear also but that's real variable thing, it depends on what's going on and so there's cases where you need to clean the ear first and then put medication in. So we are going to cover that in just a minute. This was how to put ear medicine in your dog's ears. And next we are going to cover a couple of different ways to clean the dog's ears.