Any Ideas on How to Make Pills Easier for Bun to Take?

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ClarBun

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Hello Everyone!

Clarence was recently started on Meclizine. He gets two and a half pills (12.5 mg) two times a day as needed for dizziness.

The instructions were to crush the pills into powder and mix with water into a "slurry" and syringe feed it to him. He is usually really good at taking oral medications that at least taste somewhat decent but he will not go near this.

That being said, has anyone ever tried to use diluted fruit juice of some sort to make this process easier? Obviously I know the sugar content is high and I don't want to upset his tummy but there has got to be a way to make this easier. He literally just lets it dribble right out of his mouth!

Thanks!
 
This is why any pill type medication should be made into a suspension by a pharmacy.

I wouldnt use juice, rather apple sauce or pureed banana or baby food.
Keep in mind pills are meant to be swallowed whole because the medication tastes HORRIBLE. So grinding it up just makes it taste worse and the horrible taste is in every drop. So you need something thick enough to hide it better.
 
When my bun needed chronic medication in pill form, we would give it to him in a small bit of banana and he gobbled it all up (his GI tract was very healthy, so the small fruit treat every morning wasn't really an issue).
 
Mixing it with a small amount of fruit juice or something like unsweetened applesauce should be okay.
You could talk to your vet about getting meclizine through a compounding pharmacy though it may be more expensive. Meclizine is available over the counter (it's a motion sickness medication for humans) but I'm not sure what the tablet sizes are.
Watermelons I'm not sure what the rules are in Canada but in the US veterinary compounding can be illegal (the laws are a little hazy on compounding things for ease of administration) and can definitely be hard to do right. Some vets will compound in-office and others are much more wary.
 
Watermelons I'm not sure what the rules are in Canada but in the US veterinary compounding can be illegal (the laws are a little hazy on compounding things for ease of administration) and can definitely be hard to do right. Some vets will compound in-office and others are much more wary.
Oh jeeze really?
No issues here unless the perscribing vet is refusing because they dont want to loose money on selling the meds themselves. Some vets can do their own compounding as well.
Here, the vet just needs to fax your pets perscription to whatever pharmacy you want and they will compound just about anything in any flavour you want. Tuna, tuti fruity, banana, beef, peanut butter, oh the list goes on.
Some pharmacys obviously have more selection then others and may not even have the med in question which is why phoning around is best. Some will even compound OTC meds for you at a small cost as well.
 
I've taken a very small amount of banana, mashed it up with water and added the crushed pills. Its watery enough to still use the syringe. The mixture smells like banana and now he LOVES it. No need to wrap him in the bun-burrito anymore! Thanks everyone.
 

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