Pain management

摘要

When Dr. William J. Tranquilli first started teaching veterinary anesthesiology at the University of Illinois College of Veterinary Medicine in 1979, his primary focus was showing students how to safely anesthetize animals so they were not in danger of suffering heart or lung failure. Even after becoming board certified, Dr. Tranquilliilike others in his specialty--did little to help patients cope with pain after surgery. But by 1995 Dr. Tranquilli had made pain management an integral part of his course. He encouraged students to use preemptive and postoperative analgesic drugs, as well as regimens once unheard of, such as multimodal analgesia. Today, Dr. Tranquilli, a professor of clinical medicine in anesthesiology, advocates aggressive treatment for acute and chronic pain. He has also co-authored a book for practitioners on managing pain in small animals. "When we say 'pain management,' it's not about giving a drug at one point and then saying 'OK, I gave the drug, I did my job,'" he said."It's management. In other words, you don't really know [how much the patient is suffering], so you start to treat it,see how it responds, ask'Do I need to give him more, or can I just leave him alone?' It's an art, it becomes interactive:'