BOX 4-1Current Guidelines for Clinical Veterinary Pain Management

• Sedation does not provide pain relief and may mask the animal’s response to pain.
• Use of analgesic and adjunct drugs should be at effective plasma/tissue concentrations especially when the nociceptive barrage and pain are greatest (i.e., after surgery or injury).
• Use of more than one type of management strategy (e.g., multimodal analgesia [targeting multiple pain mechanisms with the use of local anesthetics and opioids] or anxiolytics when postsurgical pain is likely to be moderate to severe) is recommended.
• Avoidance of peaks and valleys in analgesic dosing (best accomplished by the administration of continuous or overlapping regimes) when postsurgical pain is expected to be severe maintains animal well-being.
• Monitoring, at appropriate intervals, of the effectiveness of analgesics administered is crucial.
• If there is doubt about the source of an animal’s clinical signs, administration of an additional dose of analgesic—dependent on the drug, species, and often the individual animal—can help determine whether pain was the cause (while this is not commonly done in laboratory animal medicine, this method of pain control/alleviation in nonrodent species is common in clinical veterinary practice in a patient-specific manner).