Pain Relief for Your Pet

Dogs, cats, rabbits and birds (well most of them anyway)  cannot tell us when they are in pain and in need of pain relief.

In fact most of our patients try to hide the fact that something hurts (except Helen’s dog, Pig, who isn’t very brave). Pain is not a benign thing, it causes psychological and physiological stress. To put it simply we and our pets would all rather not feel pain. Unfortunately, the presence of pain is common, it occurs with surgery, trauma, illness and cancer for example. We can try and prevent it, but we cannot always do that, so we give pain relief.

At Vasse Vets we have the philosophy that we would rather our patients have too much pain relief than not enough, in other words – we would rather them have pain relief and not need it, than need it and not have it.

Pain relief is complex

The science behind pain is complex,but the bottom line is, it hurts!  We can take advantage of this complexity by using different drugs that target different pathways of the creation and perception of pain. This is known as multimodal analgesia, and we love it! Multimodal analgesia produces vastly superior pain relief with fewer side effects. This means less of the ouch.

We, at Vasse Vets, have done further training to learn how to do multimodal analgesia techniches, such as epidurals, nerve blocks, intra-articular anaesthesia and continuous rate infusions. We have the equipment and the drugs to do these techniques for your pet. This means less pain and a faster recovery.

Prevention of pain

Pain prevention is also critical. This can only realistically be achieved in surgery patients when we know that some trauma is going to occur to create pain. Gentle surgical technique is very important in prevention of pain, the more gentle a surgeon is the less trauma to the tissues and the less stimulation of the pain receptors, creating less pain.

Another component of pain prevention is through the prevention of “wind up” pain. This phenomenon occurs when there is strong, repeated stimulation of pain receptors (for example during an orthopaedic surgery) causing increased intensity of pain perception. Put in simpler terms, some surgeries or injuries make the brain perceive the pain to be worse than it is. Not good. Pain relief before and during surgery is vital in prevention of “wind-up” pain.

At Vasse Vets we ensure that our surgeons are experienced and as gentle as possible, and that our patient’s anaesthetic safety and pain relief – before, during and after surgery – is never a second thought. Your pet is treated as we would want our own pets treated…as if they have a very low pain threshold.