Considering how each patient uniquely feels pain

Kyle Bartholomew, DVM, DACVAA, clinical assistant professor of veterinary anesthesia, University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine, was an instructor for the “Small Animal Anesthesia for the Practice Team” continuing education course at the first NAVC SkillShop hosted by the North American Veterinary Community in Orlando, Florida. He presented lectures and provided lab instruction with colleagues over 4 days, including a session on balanced anesthesia and analgesia. In a dvm360 interview, Bartholomew offers one piece of advice for all practitioners when prescribing analgesics to patients.

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The following is a transcript of the video:

Kyle Bartholomew, DVM, DACVAA: One thing I'd like practitioners to remember is that while it's easy to create standardized protocols for every patient that you have, make sure to treat your patients individually. Make individual protocols for each patient and assess their pain individually and uniquely.

Different patients will experience different levels of pain from the same procedure, so they may require different amounts of analgesics for treating that pain postoperatively. Make sure to use pain scores for evaluating how much pain that patient is in. Using appropriate analgesia for each individual patient post operatively, can help treat that pain—acute pain—and help prevent it from becoming any sort of chronic painful state.

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