Tag: Pain Management
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Neutrophils
The next time you’re feeling a little rough from a cold, injury or abrasion, spare a thought for the humble neutrophil – the workhorse first responders of the immune system. The minor inconvenience you’re impatiently waiting to get better from has spelled the end for thousands of these plucky little cells. Here’s one of them…
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Pitfalls of pet insurance
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Nowadays, insurance is not the be all and end all. It is no longer the all-singing, all-dancing green light to work up a case to “gold standard” without financial restraints. So many companies are out there with so many variations in policies that it’s seemingly impossible to keep up. The question “is he insured?” is…
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Commonly held beliefs that don’t do us any good, pt 2
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Belief #2: if you can’t afford to care for an animal then you shouldn’t have one You, young doctor or nurse – living in your privileged society of excess, with your years of study, working in an industry that exists largely to minimise animal suffering – have certain expectations of what “taking care of an…
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Shopping – it’s not that much of a mystery
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I’ve just read a breakthrough email – not a huge fanfare of exams passed or a lottery win, but something that, nevertheless, made me realise how far I’ve come over the past few years. The email was a simple one: “You are still on our list for XYZ role, but we haven’t used you in…
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The fallacy of prophecy
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Evolution by natural selection has provided us with some wonderful tools to make sense of and manipulate the world. All of us carry around one of the most complicated objects in the universe within our skull, and our bloated, folded brains are able create illusionary facsimiles of the world around us, and imagine what may…
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Two cats: a tale of diametric treatments
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I thought I would take well to emergency work; I’m a night owl, and when animals crashed or bled in general practice I kept my cool and worked logically, but quickly, to discover the problem and fix it – or at least, attempt to. I had recently left my post as clinical director, and picking…
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The wonder of cells
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Since starting a career in clinical pathology, I have seen a lot of strange and wonderful sights down my microscope… It’s like being given a window into weird new worlds – tiny battlegrounds of leukocytes, tumour cells and microorganisms, against a backdrop of cytokines, stroma and necrosis. It’s not quite Saving Private Ryan, but with…
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AFAST, part 2
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Part one of this series looked at how to perform an abdominal focused assessment with sonography for trauma (AFAST) – this week looks at how to interpret abdominal fluid scores (AFS) in a clinical setting. To recap – the score is out of a possible 4, with each site allocated a 0 or 1 based…
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Mastering the art of veterinary medicine
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Veterinary medicine, veterinary surgery, veterinary science; whatever you want to call it, veterinary has all these academic connotations – and rightly so. But a lot of what we do is not black and white – very few “textbook cases” or one-size-fits-all diagnostic approaches exist. There are so many balls to juggle – client requests, patient (and…
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Nail clipping
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“Clip nails” It seems innocuous. It looks so simple and routine on the consulting list – no worrying about history taking, no complicated diagnoses or treatment plans – just clip the nails. A quickie that may even give you a chance to snatch a few minutes back so you can stay on time: this is…