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PAIN MANAGEMENT

Why it's important to manage your pet's pain
Pain management is very important at Animal Medical Clinic. Our pain management guidelines will improve the recovery process, whether from illness, surgery or injury. Best of all, because it reduces stress and increases a sense of well being, pain management may even help your furry friend live longer.

What is Pain?
Pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage. Pain may be acute or chronic.

Key Points

  • Pain recognition is difficult in veterinary patients due to the inability to verbally communicate
  • Animals experiencing pain may exhibit certain distinct behaviors and may have deviations in normal physiologic variables
  • Knowledge of negative sequelae that result from the presence of pain should prompt use of preemptive analgesics when feasible. Pre-emptive analgesia is much more effective and it allows use of less anesthetic induction agent and gas too.
  • Once diagnosed, pain should be treated promptly and the success monitored on a frequent basis
  • Treatment of pain can be considered successful if the degree of pain does not prevent an animal from engaging in relatively normal activities, such as eating, sleeping, ambulating, grooming, and interacting with other members of its species or its care givers
  • Decreased pain leads to a better physiologic state and better healing. It's good medicine.
  • A multi-modal approach is more effective. Different drugs work at different sites and are synergistic.

Pain Recognition
Recognition of pain is easier in human patients than in animals. There are no ideal methods or "gold standards" available to evaluate pain in animals. When considering how we might assess pain in animals, considerable parallels can be drawn with the situation in human infants. With our animal patients we need to use our knowledge of normal behavior, information about how similar procedures or disease processes affect humans, and observation of the behavior of the patient to determine the degree of pain being suffered. We can also observe for inflammation around a wound (redness, heat, swelling), as this usually enhances pain.

Magnitude of Pain
The first step in managing acute post-operative pain is to make a "best guess" about the severity of pain, before the animal is recovered from anesthesia. This in turn will provide some initial guidance in formulating a postoperative care plan. In other words, it is important to try and determine how aggressively to treat the animal with analgesics and anxiolytics. The severity of pain for each individual will be affected by many factors, including: the degree of tissue trauma, the type of tissue trauma (superficial versus deep, skin, muscle, periosteum, nerve), the drugs used during the pre- and operative period, and the characteristics and experiences of the individual animal (young animals are markedly less tolerant of pain than mature animals). Procedures are often ranked according to the severity of pain into mild, moderate, severe and excruciating. Although this is a subjective evaluation of the degree of pain, it at least provides a basis to begin therapy for pain.