ABSTRACT
Pain management has become one of the more inspiring contemporary issues in veterinary medicine. It is an area of progressive research, revealing new understandings on an almost daily basis. Accordingly, ‘current’ insights to pain management is a relative term. In some respects the management of pain, especially in companion animal practice, is more thorough than in human medicine. And, although it is amusing to recognize that most pain in humans is managed based upon rodent data, considerable direction for managing pain in animals is based upon the human pain experience. This is because many physiological systems are similar across species, and large population studies often conducted in human medicine require resources prohibitive in veterinary medicine. Herein, evidence-based veterinary pain management will likely always be under some degree of scrutiny. Since our maturation of understanding the complex mechanisms of pain comes from studies in different species with many physiological processes in common, it is fitting to consider the study of pain as ‘one science’.
