ASSESSING ACUTE AND CHRONIC PAIN IN DOGS AND CATS

摘要

Despite significant advances in pain management for companion animals, pain is still undertreated. One of the main reasons for this is the difficulty in recognizing and "measuring" pain in non-lingual species. To treat pain we must first look for it,recognize it, and quantify it in some way so we can assess the efficacy of our interventions. Pain is a complex multidimensional experience with both sensory and psychological components. The sensory-discriminative component is "how it feels" (type, source, and intensity of pain) and the affective-emotional component is "how does it make the animal feel?"