Pet Pain Relief: Keeping Your Pet Comfortable Is Key for Quicker Recovery & Better Quality of Life

In the not too distant past, the general thinking was that pets didn’t experience pain the same way we do. The truth of the matter is they do—they just can’t express that pain the same way humans do. At Intermountain Pet Hospital, pain management is a crucial component of treatment for our patients and something we pay special attention to.

Prior to all surgeries, we administer pain medicine to help our patients relax and get comfortable from the beginning. Before the surgical anesthesia wears off, your pet is given a local anesthetic. Another technique we utilize to reduce post-operative pain and help speed healing is our therapeutic laser. In addition to all of these in-office pain management techniques, we often send your pet home with pain medication. It may seem like we go to extreme lengths to keep your pet comfortable—because we do. All these extra steps reduce the occurrence of pain getting worse, so your pet is not in excruciating pain upon waking from surgery. Reducing pain obviously helps your pet stay as comfortable as possible and has been proven to shorten recovery time as well.

Our veterinary staff has extensive training in managing pet pain. To continue our education, we bring in specialized veterinary anesthesiologists to give us hands-on training regarding the most current pain management procedures, medicines, and techniques. This training helps ensure that our entire pet care staff is educated on the very best anesthetics, state-of-the-art epidurals, pain patches, and local anesthetics. Using a multi-modal pain management technique and being proactive in anticipating the pain your pet will experience allows us to take steps to enable your pet to heal quickly and experience as little post-operative pain as possible.

Laser Therapy

Another important aspect of our pain management protocol at Intermountain Pet Hospital is the state-of-the-art laser therapy we offer. Laser therapy is widely used by veterinarians to treat wound healing, acute and chronic injuries, and pain and inflammation, and it is becoming increasingly popular across the United States. We use this powerful tool after surgical procedures to speed up the healing process and reduce pain. As we incorporate laser therapy into our pain management protocol more and more, we believe long recovery periods and extended treatment will soon be a thing of the past.

Two types of lasers are used in the veterinary health care industry today: surgical laser and therapeutic laser. While surgical lasers are used to cut tissue, therapeutic lasers are used to heal tissue. To explain the process, the light from the therapeutic laser penetrates into deep tissues, where the photons stimulate physiological processes at the cellular level. As this occurs, both the cellular respiratory and metabolic rates increase significantly. The physiological effect on those cells is only photochemical and not photothermal, or heat producing, in nature. Your pet remains calm and comfortable throughout the entire procedure.

We use therapeutic laser at Intermountain Pet Hospital for a wide range of veterinary issues, including:

• Post-surgical healing
• Wound treatment
• Arthritis relief
• Back pain
• Infections, including the skin and ear
• Orthopedic conditions, such as ACL or fractures
• Nerve injury
• Soft tissue injuries

In some cases therapeutic laser isn’t recommended, such as eye disorders, cancer, and hemorrhage. For those conditions, we will suggest an alternative course of treatment for your pet’s health concern.