Heart problems in your pets are certainly life-threatening, especially for these creatures who cannot verbally describe what they are feeling. Janet King and Dr. Alice Jeromin sit down with Dr. Jonathan Goodwin, a veterinary cardiologist, to share the next steps you should take in case your pets are experiencing some discomfort. He explains what to do when your cats or dogs are experiencing heart murmurs and the right time to seek emergency assistance for them. Dr. Goodwin also shares the healthiest diet for your pets and how to keep their heart health in optimal levels at all times.
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Dealing With Your Pet’s Heart Problems – Dr. Jonathan Goodwin
Everyone, welcome to the show. It is all about the heart! Your pet has been recently diagnosed with a heart murmur. Is that bad? What do I do next? What are the next steps? My pet fainted. Is that related to heart disease? Do pets have heart attacks? We are going to find out all about the heart today with our special guest, veterinary cardiologist Dr. Jonathan Goodwin, who is also the host of The Vet Cardio Bro YouTube channel.
Anyway, a little bit about Dr. Goodwin, he is a Tuskegee grad and went on to do his cardiology residency at Purdue. We cannot thank him enough for doing the show. I promise you, you are going to learn a lot and have a lot of fun because when I listen to him in webinars, I am chuckling as I am walking, and people are looking at me like “What?” Welcome, Dr. Goodwin, so nice to have you join us.
Thank you so much. I’m glad to be here.
Janet, why don’t you start? I know you had questions about heart disease that I could not answer.
How To Tell If Your Pet Has A Heart Problem
I ask the questions that your basic layman vet customer, vet mom, asks. How do I even know if my pet has a heart problem?
A lot of times, these little babies that have heart issues do not come in saying, “There is a big one, Elizabeth. I am coming up to join you, honey.” They are not. Doing all that, they will look tired. A lot of owners say, “He is just getting old.” It will be those little triggers that might make you say, “Let me just check and see, is this really age or is this something else?”
You keep hearing a heart murmur. What is a heart murmur? To me, when you say heart murmur, mmm, it is going, like what? Humans have them, pets have them.
You hit on a big thing. All a heart murmur is the sound of turbulent blood flow. The easy example to think of is, let us say you are outside, it is a beautiful day. Hopefully, it will be a beautiful day where you are soon, and you have your water hose on. Water is coming out of the water hose. It has a steady sound. Now, if someone were to kink that water hose, all of a sudden, the water gets choppy.
If you put your thumb over the end of the water hose, it starts to spray differently. What we are saying in that situation is that something is interrupting the flow. Something is disturbing the normal flow. In the heart, we have our chambers, we have our valves, and there is supposed to be a nice, smooth flow between the heart. The heart has a nice rhythm. You have got to have rhythm for your heart.
Speaking of sprinklers, it makes me think of a dance.
Those sprinkler dances.
I could not resist, Alice, sorry.
Sprinkler sounds more choppy because you keep cutting off the flow. If you just let it flow, it would be, “Sssss.”
That is the best explanation ever, but that sounds bad.
Listen to me. You hit on it there. It is not that it is good or bad, it is that it is. When it is, we want to go check and see. I will tell people a lot of times, it is easy. Alice, when your phone rings, it might sound like, “Ba-doop, ba-doop, ba-doop.” Janet, yours might sound like, “Da-da-da-da-da.” My question is, those are two different ringers. Which phone call is more important?
Can I use the loudness of the ringer to tell me how important the phone call is? The mistake that happens, just as human nature, is that we often discuss some murmurs in terms of how loud they are. We grade them on a scale of six. Grade one, soft and intermittent. Grade six, like a cell phone. It’s very loud.
The problem is that the loudness does not tell you whether it is good or bad. It tells you loud or soft. When we go, and we say, “There is a murmur,” we are just describing it. It would be like if you went to your house and your smoke alarm went off. If you are at a hotel and a smoke alarm goes off, which fire is hotter? We do not use the alarm to tell us the severity. We use the alarm to say, “Something is going on.”
We do not use heart murmurs to tell us the severity, but to let us know that something wrong is going on. Share on XI have a five-year-old golden. She is a Chinese rescue. Of course, I was horrified. I heard a murmur and immediately called on my internal medicine friends. I do not have a cardiologist friend. Anyway, long story short, we contacted the cardiologist, and they did a chest X-ray. Is that the next step? What is the next step, or is there not one?
That is on the mama gene. Mamas jump into that right off. That is perfect. If they hear a murmur, they want to at least get a chest X-ray to see if there is any change in the heart size. If there is a change in the heart size that says, “Something is really happening. We have got to get to cardiology a little sooner.”
If there is no change in the heart size, we can say, “We can get to cardiology and get specific knowledge about why this is,” or we can say, “Let us check this x-ray again in one month, two months, three months, based on what is going on.” You have options there, but the murmur itself just gives you an idea that something is not flowing as smoothly as it once was.
What if they get other symptoms, and what are those symptoms that could mean it is progressing too badly?
Some of it will depend on your dog’s lifestyle a little. If you ask me what a perfect world is, I would say, “If you have a young, healthy golden that has got a lot of energy, you probably take some good long walks. Knowing that golden, they are probably leading you the whole way on the walk.” If you guys happen to take a two-mile-a-day walk, and they are leading you there and leading you back, and they have always done that.
Now, all of a sudden, on the way back, they are standing with you or dropping behind you, that could be a very early sign that something is not quite right. It depends on the animal in that sense, because a lot of these babies are just couch potatoes. If they do not really exercise much, you are not going to catch anything until they are coughing and breathing, or fainting.
The example I have given to people before is if you were a person who always ran five miles every day, and you start to feel a little tired, you are going to drop it down to three miles every day. You start feeling a little tired, “I am just going to do three miles Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.” You go to the doctor. “Do you exercise?” “I run three miles on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday.” It is not that that is bad, but compared to what you were doing, that might be a little bit off for you.
Is that not the truth? Especially with pets, any change in their normal routine means they need to be checked. No matter like, derm, cardio, I mean, anything. They are repetitive in their actions and their eating. Any change needs to be addressed. Do pets have heart attacks like humans?
I get that one a lot as well, and I always say, “If they live to be 80, I think they may.” A heart attack in itself typically occurs when we get clogged arteries that do not allow good blood flow through to get to the heart. We do not typically see that in them, and I think it is just because they do not live long enough to get those clogged arteries.
This is not on topic, but do they ever put dogs on those diet shots, Ozempic? I am just thinking about that.
They probably need to, but you know what is so funny? Our sweet darling America, we like stuff fast. You are like, “I can work out every day for three months, or can you just give me a shot?” The dogs would prefer to go running and play.
As a pet owner, you can adjust their diet. They do not have a choice. The owner has to put up with it. We eat a lot of crap as humans. Got it.
Give me those corn chips.
This, I know, is rare, but I was reading about it the other day. A pet came in limping, and there was a blood clot due to heart disease, and everyone was looking at it for arthritis. Are you encountering that? I thought that was fascinating.
What you would actually like about that is that one of the big things in veterinary medicine is the difference among species. Humans, horses, and cats have very sticky platelets. Sticky platelets set you up for blood clots. Dogs, cows, pigs, goats, and sheep do not really have sticky platelets. We do not see that as often. It is not that it is impossible, but it takes a lot more, and it is not usually a cardiac reason. For cats and humans, you will get more clots from cardiac reasons because to get a clot, you just need blood to be sitting still, damage to the lining, or there to be a situation where your body is making more clots.
When you were studying in vet school, did you do a lot of human work?
Not a ton in vet school to the point where we looked at the humans, but they put a big emphasis, I know Alice would say the same thing, on what things we can catch. They call them the zoonotic things. A lot of the people at the CDC are veterinarians because they are looking out for what can jump species. In my residency, they did make us go through the pediatric section of cardiology on the human side.
That’s the department that I do not want.
Can I just say that it is true in dermatology especially for pediatric dermatology? These kids that are born, there is something called a Wooly Hair nevus, where like half their face looks like the Wolfman, and it is a mole, but it has hair. Your heart goes out to them because you know what they are going to go through in school. I know they are lasering a lot of that now. When I saw the kids with it, I went home and cried. It was sad.
I remember once when I was having babies, and my pediatrician went. I go, “What do you have the rest of the day?” She goes, “I lived in California at the time. I have to go to Stanford University, and I have to tell a family that they have a hermaphrodite. I have to help them make the decision.” I thought, “I was having a bad day. Here is this infant.” Back to dogs. We have to talk about cats, too, Janet, but go ahead with your dog question.
Do large breed dogs like I have a fabulous golden have different problems than the smaller dogs, or vice versa?
You will get certain problems with certain breeds or certain tendencies, but in general, dogs more often will get issues with their heart valves across the board. Usually, some of the bigger dogs can also get problems with their heart muscle, or any of them can get electrical problems with the heart. You almost have to think of the heart like a house. It has plumbing and electrical wiring. We can get those types of things. The little dogs very frequently get the valuable things. They do not often get heart muscle problems, but they can get electrical problems as well.
Think of those little paws going so fast.
Dr. Goodwin, is there anything when your dog is sleeping, and you see their heart goes beep, “Beep, then beep, beep, beep, is that normal? What is that?
They are dreaming.
No. Sometimes it is dreaming, but a lot of times the dreams will make them feel fast all the time. What is interesting is that all these things happen with our body that happen to everybody, and you do not really notice them. For instance, when you breathe in, a deep breath tends to slow your heart rate down. When you breathe out, it starts to speed up again. It is boom, boom, boom. It is just a normal reflex based on that stimulation of the nervous system. Call the parasympathetic nervous system. That is completely normal.
A deep breath in slows down your heart rate. When you breathe out, it starts to speed up again. Share on XThat is also square breathing. When people are anxious or have an anxiety attack, they will have them do square breathing. Breathe, you release, you hold, breathe. You are going to a square. You are breathing in, you are holding.
They said breathe in, hold, breathe out, hold.
Got it.
Breathing in slows your heart rate. That is panting. That is like a cyclone. When they are breathing in like that, it slows their heart rate, and it tends to calm them. Another one that people will do when they are anxious is start rubbing their eyes. Do you feel that relaxation feeling? Pressing on your eyeballs relaxes you down as well.
I know about that pressure on the eyeballs because that can help when a patient is seizing, too. Something with the vagus nerve. Dr. Goodwin, just one quick thing I have to tell you about the breathing in and the heart. I always remember Dr. Bob Hamlin saying, “The left ventricle sucks.” That is just an aside, I had to get that in before I forget, because I love Dr. Hamlin, cardiologist at OSU in the 80’s.
He will tell you one of the things that happens a lot because your right ventricle is not as strong, and it is having to pull blood from your feet back in. When you breathe in, that helps to fill the right ventricle. It helps suck blood into the right ventricle. When you breathe out, you release.
Why Dr. Goodwin Became A Veterinary Cardiologist
What made you go into cardiology?
I was just thinking that.
I was really one of those guys who liked the heart, and I liked the brain. I spent a lot of time trying to see which one I wanted to specialize in because I would rather be a little bit more knowledgeable in one thing than less knowledgeable in a bunch of things. I like the brain stuff, but when I worked in the cardiology stuff, we would go from 7:00 in the morning to 9:10 at night, and it did not feel like I was working.
I felt the same way. I was beating myself because I wanted to know everything about everything. Bladder surgery and this and that. I hate surgery. That is why I love Derm because it is very visual. So is yours with ultrasounds and things like that.
I still do not know the difference between an urticaria and a wheal. I still do not know the difference. Urticaria and a wheal. I remember like it was on my test, and I do not know. They look the same. You have to ask the doctor. They said urticaria. They showed me a slide of an urticaria. They showed me a slide of a wheal, and I was like, “That is the same thing.”
I love it when they rename everything, and I’m like, “Right, okay.” You know, now, atopy for cats they are calling it feline atopic skin disease. I call it catopy because you can call it FASS, whatever. Why do we have to rename stuff? I do not get it.
How Prone Are Cats To Heart Problems
Speaking of cats. I have two cats. They are siblings. The male hates me. The female loves me. It is very weird. The male likes all the men in the house. It is the weirdest thing ever. It is very strange. What do I need to worry about these kitties heartwise?
Cats are a little trickier. Cats, being a little bit more like wild animals, do not like to show their illnesses easily. They hide them a little bit better. Whenever we hear of something like a heart murmur in a cat or if we hear they will talk about a gallop heart rhythm, something that is a little bit different when you are listening, those make us want to check it out a little bit sooner with a kitty. They do have a blood test now that helps screen for some underlying heart muscle stretch. They call it the proBNP. That is very helpful for cats, just as a little screening tool to see if they have got anything going on.
Cats, being a little bit more like wild animals, do not like to show their illnesses easily. They hide them a little bit better. Share on XThey seem completely normal to me, these two, because we are at their beck and call.
We are. We call them in and out because that is all they do all day.
What other species have you worked on, Dr. Goodwin?
A lot of them. Black bear, emus.
It’s because they are not under sedation when you see them, are they? You want to hear how they really are.
The black bear and the leopard were. The emus were not. He probably should have been that guy. Limu’s cousin Nelson was not a friend.
You have nice dentition, so you must not have been harmed.
I am quick. I have sons who are hockey players, so I’ve got to be quick if I want to keep my teeth.
How big were the bear’s paws?
The bear’s paws were probably about that big.
Just imagine a swat like that.
You only get about one of them.
What about congestive heart failure? Who gets that? Do cats get that?
Can I just say, as a layman, it sounds like congestion.
People get that, right? CHF. Is that what it is?
That is exactly what it is. You are thinking of it the right way. It is an endpoint. I have said to people before that I will often use a sports analogy, like basketball. You can say somebody made a basket. Was it one where they were right under the basket and they did one of those layups, or was it a slam dunk? Was it from the free-throw line or the three-pointer?
All those different places are different diseases, and those diseases would be shooting into the goal, and when they hit that goal, “That is congestive heart failure.” Congestive heart failure occurs when your heart fails to pump blood forward. When it is not getting blood going forward, you are getting passive congestion in your lungs or in your belly. That congestion from your heart failing to keep blood going forward is congestive heart failure.
Is it treatable in a pill?
It is. The biggest thing is figuring out why it is happening. Once you figure out why, like we had a little dachshund, probably now 4 or 5 years ago, that came in for trouble breathing and had a big, loud heart murmur, and we saw that there were some leaky valves. The craziest thing is that his heart rate was 40. The problem was that his heart was so slow, it was not moving blood fast enough to compensate for those leaky valves, and the baby was going into congestive heart failure. We put in a pacemaker, and he is still rolling. We just saw him. I think he is sixteen.
Is the pacemaker hooked up to the owner’s phone?
There are some that you can track like that, but most of the ones that we get are ones where we just have to come and talk to them every once in a while. We have a special little tool, a magnet, where we can turn off the lights and shine a floodlight on with a view of the night of the thirteenth. Do our little interrogation of the face.
Can they travel with that? Can they fly with that?
Yes.
What is the normal heart rate if people want to take their dogs’ or cats’ heart rate?
The normal heart rate for a dog is 60 to 180 beats per minute. Normal heart rate for a cat is 120 to 240.
240 when they are in the vet’s office.
It is when I am putting them in the crate to go to the vet’s office.
The big one, though, that we like them to check is the breathing rate. The sleeping breathing rate. We like that to be under 40 breaths per minute.
For a cat or a dog?
Both.
Good to know. Everyone tonight has to look at the second hand on their watch and count the breaths of their pet.
She is sleeping right here.
Breathe in and out. That is one breath.
Healthy Diet For Your Pets
Is there a way diet can help?
I was going to ask that.
Diet definitely can. There is a lot of big talk about the diet, but the diet definitely can. If you have an animal, especially dogs, because they tend to get more valve disease, if they are starting to have a heart problem, one of the things they are at risk for is their body holding too much fluid. We really have to be aware of how much sodium they get in their diet. If they get a lot of salt, they hold more fluid. More passive congestion could lead to heart failure sooner.
The big talk has been about grain-free or not grain-free because what was being noticed was that some dogs were getting sick. It is a really interesting story, and the only reason I know it very intimately is because I was there when it happened. There is a blog that all the cardiologists have, where they just jot down and say, “Has anyone seen this?” It was in 2017. I do not know who it was, but someone typed in, “Have you seen any dogs whose hearts got weak on a kangaroo and oat diet?”
They had allergies, so they were on a very individual, very specific diet. Some people said, “I have seen it with this diet, or I have seen it with that.” Everybody had 2 or 3 patients that they had seen who were on what we began calling boutique exotic or grain-free. They call them BEG diets. These animals had weak hearts. We submitted all this information, and we said their hearts were weak and it looked like a disease called dilated cardiomyopathy, DCM.
The FDA took it, and there was enough information about it that they jumped on it, and they were like a diet causing DCM. It is not really DCM because DCM has no cure. It is a genetic disease, but it is the diet that causes a very weak heart. Thanks to a ton of work that has been done by Tufts University and Lisa Freeman, what we have really found is that some dogs are very sensitive to diets high in peas, chickpeas, sometimes beans, and lentils. They seem to block the heart’s ability to get strong.
Some dogs are very sensitive to diets high in peas, chickpeas, beans, and lentils. They seem to block the heart’s ability to get strong. Share on XYou will have these four-year-old, five-year-old dogs who have a super weak heart that is almost life-threateningly weak. If you get them off the peas, chickpeas, beans, and lentils, they do fine. The problem is that it is not every dog. It is very much like grapes. People know, “Do not give grapes to your dog.” Some dogs can feed on grapes as if it is no business and they have no problem. Other dogs, you give them one grape and their kidneys are ready to shut down.
We do not know who it is, so we just blanket say, “Be careful with peas, chickpeas, beans, and lentils.” A lot of the grain-free foods, when they take away the grains, replace them with peas or chickpeas, lentils, or legumes. That is where the battle has kicked in a little bit. It is not saying every dog, it is not saying these are horrible diets, but it is saying you do not know, some dogs may have a sensitivity to that diet.
That is like the legume family, which is really big in the Mediterranean diet for humans.
The humans seem to handle it fine. It seems to be a dog thing where, in its metabolism, for some dogs, those legumes, especially peas and chickpeas, can block the usage of taurine, that amino acid. Everyone thought it was a taurine deficiency. It is not a deficiency. It is just that it cannot be utilized.
That is a fabulous explanation because I remember when all of that came out, it was an explosion of “This is a bad diet.” A lot of pet food companies took a lot of crap literally because of false accusations. When you see the people on Facebook pontificating about this with incorrect information, it is absolutely horrible. That is one of the best explanations I have ever heard.
Janet, being a pet owner, you probably were not aware of that. A lot of pet owners say to me, “I have got him on a grain-free diet.” Not that that is bad. I am just saying a lot of them, then say to me, “I am not putting them on anything with corn.” It is just crazy. This is really why we started the show to get the right information out there.
The grain-free diet started with the low-carb human diet. People cut out bread. It seems like an overlap to me.
Alice, you would probably know this better than most, but for a while, I want to say it was in 2013, 2014, 2015, there was a big push about food allergies. Personally, I know it sounds crazy. I always send everybody to the dermatologist. Find out what they are allergic to. You guys are the quickest at knowing, “This looks like food. This looks like this.” When those food allergies kicked in, whether it was to wheat or corn or whatever, that is when it gave a foothold to, “We need something without the grains.” Everyone started jumping on that. Three or four years after that, we are seeing all the animals because there was such an explosion of diets that were supposed to be anti-allergenic.
They took corn out because we are corn-free.
It is not bad. Corn is not bad.
No, it is not. Eight percent protein in corn. Actually, people think it is bad.
There were just some that had allergies to it, I guess. That is what it is, from what I understand.
The New York Times just did a little article on potatoes and how healthy they are. They have more potassium than a banana. This is for humans. The red potatoes and purple potatoes have this other component in them that the white potatoes do not. White potatoes are just as good for you as sweet potatoes.
How To Know If Your Pet Needs Emergency Attention
It was just fascinating because we think of potatoes as French fries or potato chips, but we are talking about a baked potato. The big issue is not putting all the sour cream. Do not put the butter. Just use olive oil and a little salt. It was fascinating. I have a question. How do I know when it is time to get my pet, my dog or cat, to the emergency vet with a heart issue? What am I looking for?
If it is to get them to the emergency vet, those are usually a little bit more, I do not want to say easy, but it is one of those things where if you are uncomfortable with their breathing because they look to be uncomfortable from their breathing, if they all of a sudden are looking very pale, very weak, some of these things are not specific. It makes it a little bit unclear.
It is not pure, but you could have a dog that is having a bleeding issue, or it could be the heart. The issue is that the heart is trying to get blood to all the parts of the body. If you are losing blood, it can look like a heart thing. If you have animals that are having fainting issues or low blood pressure, it can look like a heart thing. There are a lot of these things that happen, but we cannot tell for sure what it is unless we take a look. I would say when in doubt, if you are seeing something that has got you concerned, it may just be safer to just take him in and get that peace of mind.
If you are seeing something in your pets that has got you concerned, it may just be safer to bring them to a vet and get that peace of mind. Share on XTrust your gut.
Especially mom, if a mom says, “He is not right. He needs to go.”
What I like about cardiology? Most of your diagnostics are not invasive. I love that. Echo, EKG. I mean, that is so nice.
I really love that as well. That is part of one of the things that you had asked the question about before, why cardiology. When I was doing the testing and the learning, and all the residency and the internship, the big thing in neurology is to get an answer, and everybody who is a vet wants an answer. You have to do an MRI, and that is like a $3,000, $4,000 test.
You have to knock them out.
Anesthesia, so you might be talking about $5,000 to get an answer. I know you do not want to put a price tag on your babies that cuts a lot of people out. I’m not saying cardiology is cheap, but with an echocardiogram and an ECG, that might be twenty percent of that cost of $5,000. I can have the owner right there with me. We are looking, and we see it. “This is what it is. We know right off, and we can go.”
How To Know How Much Sodium Is In Your Pet Food
Getting back to the sodium, I had an episode with my dog. My husband bought those soft and moist Beggin’ Strips, which I still feel are high in salt and sugar. My dog, once we got to Florida, the dog was just taking in water, and it came right out. My internal medicine friend, Dr. Heidi Ward, worked her up for everything. It was the treats. How do I know how much sodium is in foods? I do not think they are required to list it, are they?
That is the biggest problem. You do not know. I end up saying this to people. It is just like humans. You want snacks, and everybody wants the Fritos, Cheetos, and Doritos, and they are all loaded with salt. If you want something to be healthy for them, I would do fruits or vegetables, apples, green beans, blueberries, and carrots. Dogs seem to love watermelon. I never knew it. My dog loves it.
I gave her a baby carrot once, and she just stood there with it in her mouth like, “Are you kidding me?”
Only miniature schnauzers like baby carrots. How many times have you heard that, Dr. Goodwin? I will tell you right now, all elderly miniature poodles that live with elderly people eat cooked chicken. Now, you know I am right, Dr. Goodwin.
That part is true. You are lucky it is not a rotisserie because that is it. Thanks to people like Lynn Freeman at Tufts, they put out a whole list of a bunch of foods that people love to feed their animals that are super salty to avoid. We hand out the “Avoid This” list and try to stay on it. They do a yearly check-in on a lot of the common dog foods to try to find some that are low salt for us. It is very tough.
I do not even buy dog treats. They get their food, or they get fruits and veggies, except no grapes or raisins, because I do not know what their sodium status is.
The tough part is that a lot of it is in the marketing. I am not saying this for all dogs. I am saying that for the cardiac patients, we want to watch the salt. Things that get advertised like a farmer’s dog that does these phenomenal advertisements, and they say it is human-grade. It is human-grade salty. They are not good for our pets.
I read a really interesting article comparing human-grade to what we eat, and there are different qualifications for that. Yes, it might be prepared in a factory that has certain qualifications, but the end product for humans has many more steps it has to go through, besides this human-grade product for pets.
You hit on it. There is a lot of food science. That class was really about definitions. When it says all natural, what does that mean? It is not all that natural.
Premium has no definition in pet food either.
I am excited because I drink almond milk, and if you look at the label, it has all these ingredients. I found one brand, the organic one, which is just almonds and water.
That sounds like real almond.
I have that in the fridge because it was a BOGO at Publix.
Is it the regular or the organic that has a green lid?
The green lid.
That is the one you want. I usually buy that one in the square box. This is much creamier, and I wonder why.
Dr Goodwin’s Three Pet Cats
It tastes good. I just like it, but I do not like it when it has all that stuff in it. Wait, Dr. Goodwin, tell us about your hockey players. Big year in hockey.
My place with my hockey players. I am a dog guy, and my wife is a cat lady, so we compromised, and we have three cats.
Do you not have a dog? He compromised with his wife. You know what that means? Happy wife, happy life. You can have a lot of adopted dogs.
I do not have any.
When people ask me if I have children, I say, “I had 15,000 dogs and cats. Those were all my children.” You can have that, too, with your ultrasounds.
You take care of them like that. That is the one thing that has always been nice because I have always enjoyed it when people ask me, “What would you do if it were your dog?” Funny, because that is what I just told you I would do if it were my dog.
Dr. Goodwin’s Biggest Pet Peeve
Tell us what this is. We ask all of our guests. What is your pet or human peeve other than you cannot have any dogs in the house?
I really do like cats. It is just that we have this love-hate thing because they think they run things. I am like, “Until you are paying rent, you are not running nothing.” As long as they stay on the floor and stay off my tabletops and off the kitchen counter, I am cool. They are on the counter. I am going to call the Chinese food restaurant right now.
What I do is I just take them off the counter and go, “Nope.”
Our cats, this is weird because we are having construction done, so we had to move their food, and we put it in the center of a bed because the dog cannot get to it. Do you know what they are doing? We put a beach towel under it. They are covering it up with the towel, and then they cannot get to it. I have to keep checking it.
What is that about?
I do not know. They go like this, and they cover up the food. It is the weirdest thing.
That’s why I’m here right now.
They did not think you were going to eat it. Dr. Goodwin, too bad you’re not allergic to cats.
I’m so allergic.
I have a husband who is allegedly allergic to cats, but we can drive to Florida for two days from Ohio with the cat in the cat carrier, and he seems just fine to me.
He sleeps in the hotel room with the cat.
Allegedly, he is living on Benadryl.
My husband and son are allergic, but we feed them.
LiveClear by Purina. It actually works. They are fine. Why are we doing an ad for Purina all the time? They need to sponsor us. Truly, the person who developed LiveClear has cut the allergenicity down by 40% to humans.
It works in our house.
They coat the food with an antibody to the Fel d1 antigen, and Janet lives with allergic people, and it works.
The cats sleep with my husband and my son when they are here, and they are fine.
It is weird.
They produce less antigen when the cat eats it.
That is immunology.
I have a hard time picturing antigen antibody, all that mast cell thing.
How To Deal With Heart Tumors In Your Pet
Can I ask you about heart tumors? Can you talk a little bit about that? Our sister’s basset hound had a heart tumor that actually ruptured on her way to the emergency room.
Gross oversimplification, but there are several tumors they can get. The big two, there is one that is not that bad, and there is one that is really bad. The one that’s not that bad is called a chemodectoma. It tends to be this special type of tissue that grows off the aorta. It really sits on top of the heart, almost like a top hat. Sometimes it can press into the windpipe and give them that tickle feeling if it is getting big enough.
Do you find it on ultrasound? How do you find that?
Ultrasound, and sometimes you might see it on an X-ray, but the hemangiosarcoma one, that is the scary one. That is the one that it likes to eat a hole into the heart. It might be very small, but if it eats a hole in it, it literally lets blood leak out from the heart, and they can bleed out from that. It is a horrible disease that kicks our butt regularly. Some breeds are overrepresented for it.
Dr. Goodwin, we had Dr. Breitschwerdt on, and he has some interesting research that he is finding Bartonella in a good percentage of these hemangiosarcoma tumors.
He thinks it might be cause or effect.
I am hanging onto that because I am thinking, “What if we did a good round of doxycycline in some of these?” I do not know. Ever since I read that and you’ve talked about it on the show, I cannot let that go because to me, I lost my first dog to a hemangiosarcoma of the spleen, and I do not think we have gotten that much more knowledge about it.
It still kicks our butts. Sometimes we will use some of those mushrooms, the I’m-Yunity and the UniBio, to help us out. The question to me would be, how often are you doing it? Is it Doxy for one month, two times a year? I really do not know if Bartonella is causing it. There is a lot of talk about people saying parasites are what is really causing cancer.
I read that about prostate cancer and breast cancer.
That is what they are saying. If that is the case, that is why people are saying potentially fenbendazole. I do not know if it is true. Things are being looked at now to see why we are having this mutation occur.
Discussion Wrap-up And Closing Words
Is it really parasitic, or is it infectious to begin with? I cannot thank you enough. This has been so much fun. I hope our audience is going to now count your pets’ breaths when they are sleeping. Mine are usually bothering me.
We have folks working on the house downstairs, and they are all having lunch.
Why is she not downstairs then? What is she doing with you?
She cannot get to them because I have them eat where she cannot get to. She literally just goes to Five Guys. Any five people, not like the burger.
She probably would do that too, though.
All those peanuts.
No French fries, though.
Why not?
Sodium. Amongst other things.
Thank you so much. This has been wonderful. You are just a delight.
Do not forget to tune in to the Vet Cardio Bro Show on YouTube. Dr. Goodwin cannot thank you enough. You are just so much fun.
Happy to help. Thanks so much. It was fun, guys.
Important Links
About Dr. Jonathan Goodwin
Dr. Jonathan Goodwin is a veterinary cardiologist with extensive expertise in diagnosing and treating heart conditions in animals. He earned his Doctor of Veterinary Medicine (DVM) degree from Tuskegee University and completed a residency in veterinary cardiology at Purdue University. He has dedicating his career to improving the cardiovascular health of pets. Dr. Goodwin is known for his compassionate approach, utilizing advanced diagnostic techniques and treatments to ensure the well-being of his patients.