Patient receiving intravenous partial parenteral nutrition (PPN)

Our mothers were right- when you’re sick you have to eat your chicken soup to get well. Even more importantly, we now recognize proper nutrition is critically important for the prevention and management of early disease. The same is true in our pets. Here at ASEH our internal medicine specialists have both completed residences not only in internal medicine but also small animal clinical nutrition. This training has provided both the knowledge for making the best nutrition recommendations for you pet and more importantly the sensitivity to recognize that proper nutrition should be instituted early. Our nursing staff also has extensive training and knowledge of the many pet foods available to our clients and is anxious to make recommendations for which diets are best and provide detailed recommendations for how much and when to feed our patients.

 

Malnutrition is very common in sick animal and is thought to affect up to 50% of hospitalized dogs and cats. Within days malnutrition can begin to have deleterious effects on immune function, healing and, most importantly, quality of life. While human patients will follow their doctor’s instruction to eat even though they don’t feel well or have a good appetite, it is impossible to convince a sick pet to eat if they don’t feel like it. At ASEH we have years of training and experience at providing the best possible care for the anorectic pet.

 

Options for nutritional support provided by the doctors at ASEH include the use of appetite stimulants to get our patients eating again, short-term feeding tubes when appetite stimulants are not effective, or long-term feeding tubes for those patients that will require prolonged nutritional support to recover from serious illness. We are also trained to formulate and use true intravenous nutrition (not just put glucose in the IV fluids) so that we can provide complete nutritional support for recovery of our patients who do not have a functional digestive tract.

 

Please contact us if you have any questions regarding your pet’s diet or nutritional support during its illness.

 

	Gastrostomy tube in place in a puppy. This tube goes directly into the stomach.		Cat with a naso-esophageal tube in place