Front Leg Limping

Hey, guys, My name is Dr. Larratt here at Erin Lakes Animal Hospital. Today I'm here with Rocky, or actually, not Rocky, Nico. And Niko's here because he's limping on his front leg. Now, Niko is a super nice dog, and I would never imagine that he would go ahead and try and bite me. That being said, if Bert had a bruise right here and I poked her, she would probably want to punch me. So since they don't necessarily tell us exactly where it hurts, we have to try and prod or examine or articulate or manipulate to the point where they let us know that it hurts. And so what we try to do is we try to do minimal restraint with the dogs. And so by going ahead and putting a muzzle on them, that means that we don't have to worry about their mouths. So we don't really have to hold their mouths or hold their neck or anything like that. So that's why we're going to put this muzzle on him. Not because he's a bad dog or anything like that. So let's see. I know. Okay, so here we go. Go ahead and put this on. Now, when we put the muzzle on, you want to make sure that you don't catch their ears, and you want to try and make sure that you don't catch any hair. I'm not really concerned that he's going to try and bite me. So I'm just putting the muzzle on kind of loosely, see how easy it would be for him to get it off. And then we're going to do what's called the orthopedic exam. So I'm going to manipulate all his joints in this particular leg, from the toes all the way up to his shoulder to see if I can find a spot that hurts. If I find a spot that hurts, then I'm going to see if it's repeatable. Let's see here. So starting with his toes. Okay, nothing with his toes. So now we're going to check up here. Nothing there. We're going to check his wrist. So nothing on the wrist. Now we're going to massage along the forearm. Nothing on the forearm. Then we're going to check the elbow. So. So doesn't seem to be showing me a lot of pain. Now we're going to check the humerus, which is this arm, this bone on us. And I'm just massaging along the bone because the shaft of the bone, because sometimes that can hur. That can be painful as well. We're checking the shoulder now, and we'll check the shoulder blade. So I'm not able to elicit obvious pain. So we're going to look between his pads. We'll go ahead and just disconnect this. We're going to look between his pads and see. I'm going to try and mess. I don't really feel anything there. And so now the next thing is we're going to check his neck. Sometimes what will happen is if they have neck pain, they can pinch a nerve and that can go ahead and cause, you know, them to limp. It's kind of like when you sleep the wrong way on your pillow and you kind of got a kink in your neck. It gives you problems sometimes lifting your arm certain times. Okay, and the last one is going to be this way. Let's see here. Okay, so he's not really showing me much signs of pain in particular. Anywhere in particular. So sometimes that can happen. So what we're going to do is we're going to take a force dryer and take a look at his hair and then just kind of go from there. You guys have any questions about this particular topic? We'll probably look at doing some X rays down the road. If he continues limping, give us a thumbs up. Subscribe, Share and if you have questions, leave it in the comments. Thanks for watching and have a great day.