Anesthesiology & Pain Management

Whenever confronted with a painful animal, one should consider employing a considerable effort to control the pain as best as possible and as early as possible. T

Benefits of pain management in the acute situation

Acupuncture is the act of placing a needle into the body at a specific point in order to get a desired effect.

You can never become good at pain management without understanding basic pain pathways.

Probably the most common condition associated with osteoarthritis, post-surgery and musculoskeletal abnormalities.

Most commonly used veterinary pain drug

Small animal patients with cardiac disease and/or congenital abnormalities can be challenging and sometimes intimidating patients.

Seattle company to market medical marijuana patch to control pain in dogs, horses.

To make your pain control measures top-notch, construct a scaffold of appropriate pain medications.

Constant rate infusion (CRI) analgesia is a way of providing pain control by ensuring that the blood levels of the drugs are held constant. In practice, it entails maintaining a venous access. This technique can be used during anesthesia as part of balancing the anesthetic technique and continued to the postoperative period.

Whether you are faced with anesthetizing a patient with the potential of increased intracranial pressure (ICP) or a patient with a spinal cord injury, there are special anesthetic considerations that should be made. Each patient should be thoroughly evaluated and an appropriate anesthetic protocol should be formulated.

In the veterinary profession, ?-2 adrenergic receptor agonists (?-2 agonists) are either loved or feared; this is often determined by a veterinarian's familiarity with the drug. There is no doubt that ?-2 agonists have complex effects, but understanding ?-2 agonists increase options for analgesic use, as well as sedation.

Used in veterinary medicine mostly for acute pain. Oral opioids have poor absorption in animals so there is a tendency not to use them in chronic conditions. All opioids have peripheral and central effects.

Local anesthesia is employed prior to all dental procedures. Dental procedures can be very painful. The patient often can feel dental procedures while under inhalation anesthesia.

Synthetic opioids are powerful, useful tools to manage pain for one simple reason: Receptors for naturally-occurring opioids (endorphins, enkephalins) are distributed ubiquitously throughout the body and can be found in both central and peripheral tissues.

Currently, the only analgesics available to veterinarians that prevent pain transmission are local anesthetics, which facilitate a variety of veterinary procedures.

It is now a settled matter that the adaptive capacities of animals, coupled with the innate biases of human observers, seriously impairs our ability to "know" which of our patients are in pain, how much they are in pain, and sometimes, even where they are in pain.

Benefits of pain management in the acute situation

Even in the modern day, opioids remain the cornerstone of analgesia. Aesop's fables gave rise to the saying that "Familiarity breeds contempt"; these drugs are often underappreciated because of their long history as analgesics. Opioids may not be "novel" but they are critical to pain relief and a strategy that our patients benefit from.

Pain can be protective, but through the stress response it may also contribute significantly to patient morbidity and even mortality. Anxiety may contribute directly to the hyperalgesic state through cholecystikinin-mediated "nocebo" effect.

In the last 10 years, the veterinary profession has undergone what can only be described as a sea change in perspectives about animal pain and pain control. A 1993 evaluation of a veterinary teaching hospital surgical caseload revealed only 40% of patients that had undergone highly invasive, painful procedures (including orthopedic repair, thoracotomy, and intervertebral disc decompression) received any sort of pain control, and then only based on clinical signs.

Veterinary pharmacology is increasing in complexity with advances in analgesia. A veterinarian's knowledge of drug interactions is critical to prevention of a potentially harmful event. Drug interactions are considered undesired increases OR decreases in drugs co-administered.

Pain transmission is complex and pain itself is difficult to manage in some cases. While a standardized approach to pain management forms a cornerstone from which to work, there are a variety of analgesic options available with which to provide multimodal analgesia; many veterinarians already have some of these modalities on hand.

Before improving quality of life for patients, a veterinarian must first understand the cause of a decrease in quality of life. Pain is universally accepted as decreasing quality of life but is fairly ambiguously defined; according the International Association for the Study of Pain (IASP), pain is an unpleasant sensory and emotional experience associated with actual or potential tissue damage, or described in terms of such damage.

What is a neonate or pediatric patient? Neonate patients are between 0 to 6 weeks of life and a pediatric patient is between 6 to 16 weeks of life.