Animals Unfolded

There are a few things that pet guardians rate as important when addressing the needs of their aging or terminally ill pet: they don’t want them to suffer, they want them to eat and they don’t want to see them zorked out and sedated on pain medication. And as a Certified Animal Hospice Practitioner, when I’m supporting families as we are discussing pain management with their pet’s veterinarian, the side effects are top of mind for them. (Some medications are sedating, at least temporarily though in many cases the sedation can be a big help, but I digress.) Those concerns about sleepiness are valid. And when a family gets on board with adequate pain management, I can tell you it’s not a moment too soon.  The pet does in fact typically sleep more, but it’s easy to focus so much on how drowsy a pet seems as a side effect of meds and not take into account that maybe, for the first time in a long time, the pet has attained a level of comfort because of the medications doing their inte...

Pain management has come a long way in terms of our companion animals, and it's a three-fold approach: anticipating pain (post-surgically, as an example), accessing any level of pain and of course alleviating it via prescription medication or nonpharmacologic techniques. We know that the neural pathways and neurotransmitters of animals and humans are similar, so it's safe to say that we experience pain in much the same way. That said, we are able to manage pain for pets using some (not all) of the same medications, however not all drugs are created equal, as they metabolize and affect dogs and cats differently and can even be toxic. For that reason, they are used under the direction of a veterinary doctor. We partner with vets in managing our pet's health, but accessing if an animal is in pain — not to mention the intensity of their discomfort — can be tough, given the obvious language barrier. It's really up to us humans to be vigilant and decipher what we see as b...