Acute Pain Identification And Staging

RECOGNITION OF PAIN

The morbidity associated with acute and chronic pain and associated welfare aspects have led to multiple attempts to create efficient and comprehensive tools to recognize and assess animal pain qualitatively and to some extent, quantitatively. Recent surveys of the perioperative provision of analgesia to small animals suggest that the use of analgesic drugs in small animal veterinary practice could be improved. Difficulties in recognizing pain were cited as one of the major causes for withholding analgesic treatment, suggesting that the development of pain assessment for a practice setting should help improve animal pain management. The recognition of pain in animals is problematic. In people, the self-reporting of pain is the gold standard for the assessment of pain. However, in veterinary medicine, the recognition and subsequent assessment of animal pain has a number of limitations. The recognition of pain relies uniquely on the interpretation on the animal’s behavior by an observer. We have to learn to interpret the signs of pain, which involves both behavioral and physiological responses. It is also worth remembering at this stage that:
 Analgesia should not with-held just because it may be difficult to recognize pain in an animal.
 Veterinary surgeons must be pro-active in looking for signs of pain in post-operative patients.
 If there is uncertainty about whether a post-operative patient is in pain then administering analgesia and assessing response to treatment is recommended. ...