Diagnosing Managing the Painful Medical Patient

摘要

Veterinary patients are brought to a hospital for a variety reasons including; annual healthy pet examinations, a detected physical abnormality, surgery, or for suspicious clinical signs observed by their caregiver. Our initial challenge as a veterinarian is to assimilate the following; historical and current .patient history, data from the physical examination and our own clinical observations, to then address and treat the pet. This can be daunting. Simply stated, our goal is to improve the healthand well-being of our patients to the best of our abilities. As we practice veterinary medicine in the 21st century, most of us agree that pain management is an important aspect of patient care. However anticipating, recognizing, and implementing appropriate pain management strategies for our patients is challenging.Unfortunately, pain and its interpretation is subjective. The gold standard of pain assessment in human medicine, is to self-report the extent, quantity, and degree of pain experienced by the patient. However, self-reporting is not possible in our veterinary patients. Instead, we rely on the observed patient pain assessment by the caregiver, technician, and/ or doctor. Fortunately, pain assessment scales have existed in human medicine for decades, and have also been recently developed and validated in veterinary medicine to help us better evaluate and treat pain in our patients.