Today we're going to start by showing you how
to perform the physical examination of the dog. Before you
start with the examination, we want to step back
and take a look over the entire dog. We
want to maybe watch them walk throughout the room and
we're looking for any limping or any symmetry in the
gate. I want to look at them overall and
look for our body condition and again looking for any
asymmetry in the muscles. Once we've observed them without
putting our hands on them we can go ahead and
start into the physical examination. For the physical examination,
we're gonna start with the examination of the head,
neck. So we start with the nose and for
the nose we're gonna look for color when I look
for symmetry and we look for any discharge. We
also want to make sure that they're moving air equally
out of both sides of the nose. Once we've
had a look at the nose, we're going to
go ahead and gently lift our lip and look at
our teeth. Let's start with one side. Here,
look at our teeth, look for tartar calculus,
any fractures, anything asymmetrical, any swelling,
redness or discharge. We're gonna go ahead and do
the same thing when lifting lip on the other side,
looking for the same things. Once we've done
that, and then gently place our index finger behind
the canine and the thumb here on the incisors and
very quickly have a look at the tongue and the
pharynx and the palette again looking for any symmetry,
redness, swelling, anything out of the ordinary.
Once we've gone ahead and looked at the mouth we're
gonna go ahead and look at the eyes. To look
at the eyes, we're gonna grab our direct
ophthalmoscope, turn it on and we're going to
get the first eye into focus. From there, we're
gonna dial in the magnification. So we're looking further
in toward the fungus and the retina and then back
looking at the cornea, looking for any redness swelling
or discharge in the eye. We're gonna go ahead
and repeat the process for the other eye again,
looking for anything abnormal redness, swelling, discharge or
anything asymmetrical. Once we've looked at the eyes we're
gonna go ahead and look at our ears. Alright
grab our otoscope. The ears are a sensitive
area so we want to be very gentle with our
otoscope. Well don't want to be pushing or
forcing it down into the ear canal. So we
want to do is gently with our thumb and index
fingers grab your ear and pull it out laterally as
we're doing so with our other fingers we can push up
on the canal. We can then just lay our
otoscope in and maneuver the canal so we can
look for our tympanic membrane, looking for any
discharge evidence of otitis anything out of the ordinary there.
Once we've done that for one ear we can
come around to the other side and look at the
other ear as well and both both of his ears look very
normal. Once we've looked at our ears, we're
gonna feel for lymph nodes, I'm gonna start with
our submandibular lymph nodes here. It should be
right here at the corner of the mandible. They
should be small for him, about pea sized, freely
movable and soft. We're going to move a little bit more medial
and we're gonna feel are parotid salivary glands which should
be a little bit larger about the size of a
lima bean and should be fairly fixed and firm. Now
all of his feel normal. We're gonna go ahead
and finish by feeling down our neck here, along
our trachea for any other enlarged lymph nodes. That finishes
the exam of the head and neck.