Pain in pets

Ouch, pain. Not fun, but unfortunately a big part of life. Did you know some people are born not able to feel pain? This leads to auto mutilation since they do not feel pain, and also shortens their life. Pain is necessary so you do not burn yourself, crush body parts, freeze yourself, etc, etc. Pain tells you also, do not move that sprained ankle and wait until you feel better to get going again. If you are in a state of fight and fly, your body may override those adaptation mechanisms to permit you to run away on the worse of injury (mountain lion attack, etc). These are mechanisms to help you survive.

It was believed, not long ago, that animals since they cannot tell you if they are painful, that we could not tell when they were. We’re much better now and we even have pain scale for dogs and cats. Since pain in pets can be subtle, it is our job as veterinarian to inform you how to detect subtle changes of pain. This can be, not as active, not jumping as high, moving more slowly, shorter walks then before, etc. A pet in pain will not necessarily vocalize. If you have mild to moderate arthritis (and a lot of us have it), we do not complain all day long and so do pets.

Now, pain becomes a real problem (a pain in the ….), when it becomes “maladaptive”. Meaning, your body has changed the perception of pain to one that does not serve any purpose. Chronic pain triggers changes in the nervous system, which can make you feel pain around the site of injury with a non painful light touch (allodynia), feel exaggerated pain (hyperalgesia) and feel pain at other places then the original injury site (secondary hyperalgesia). Actually, it makes me think of acupuncture where you can treat the opposite knee to get pain relief on the painful one.

As you can see, pain is not an on-off button. Changes in the nervous system do make it challenging to control pain sometimes. As we learn more about pain, we realize a combination of drugs can help our chronic painful patients. Also, we are learning more about choosing the right medication(s)/modality(ies) for the right type of pain (nerve pain, inflammation, combination, etc).

Want more information? Check the following website: http://www.ivapm.org/

I feel no pain, mmmm