No, is the short and sharp answer. A spark neglected makes an almighty fire

When your pet develops an itch, the problem can soon enter a vicious cycle. Your pet’s nails and mouth are often not very clean, and therefore itching can damage the skin and allow bacteria to cause an infection in the skin. This causes another problem on top of the original cause of the itch (fleas, mites, allergies).

The longer you leave your pet scratching and injuring it’s own skin, the worse the infection can get. It will soon reach a stage where we need to use medication to stop this cycle, while we also still need to find the original cause of the itch and deal with that.

As the world is dealing with the emergence of multi-resistant bacteria (think MRSA for example), it is our duty to protect the antibiotics that we have got and we need your help to do so: the less antibiotics we need to use in your pet the better.

If you bring your itchy pet in earlier rather then later, we have a much better chance to break the cycle by finding and removing the cause of the problem without needing to use antibiotic tablets. Instead, we can use a change of food or a simple medicated wash to cleanse and soothe the skin. The result will be a happy itch-free pet, you as an owner not having to deal with (as many) tablets and we as your vet relieved to be able to do our bit in protecting World Health through appropriate antibiotic stewardship.