Our doctors recommend year-round heartworm and flea and tick prevention but we often find pet parents have preventatives left over from the previous year. If you need some help remembering when it’s time for regularly scheduled parasite preventatives, here are four tips to make sure your furry friends remain protected year round:
For those who prefer a visual reminder, attach stickers included with the preventatives to your wall or desk calendar as soon as you return home from the vet clinic. The stickers are usually brightly colored to catch your attention and help you remember monthly dosing instructions.
Smartphones vary, but all include a calendar as a standard installed application. For a monthly preventative, select a date, create a reminder with the preventative name, add a time, select every month to repeat on the same date, and save.
There are a number of free human medication reminder apps available to smartphone users. Some of our clients use Medisafe to track all of their pet medications, including regularly scheduled preventatives. We like Medisafe because it allows the user to select from a number of tablet/capsule images when reminders are created. This is especially helpful if your pet is on multiple medications that look similar. On the specified date/time, the Medisafe reminder alarm will continue to ring on your smartphone until you turn it off.
Finally, all BRVC clients have access to our free app at https://petdesk.com/pet-cat-dog-app/. In addition to setting medication reminders, you may use the app to request appointments and prescription refills and access your pet’s medical history, vaccination records, and health service reminders.
Regardless of which reminder method you choose, it’s important to make sure your pet is protected from heartworm infection and tick-borne diseases. Prevention is better for your pet and it’s more cost-effective for you to prevent these diseases than to treat them!