Pain Management in Veterinary Medicine
Summary
Pain management in veterinary medicine encompasses the assessment, prevention and relief of pain across a broad range of species and clinical contexts. Effective protocols combine pharmacological agents—such as non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs), local anaesthetics and opioids—with non-pharmacological approaches including physical therapy and environmental enrichment. Multimodal analgesia, which utilises complementary drug classes acting at different points in the pain pathway, has become the gold standard for surgical and routine husbandry procedures. Objective measures of pain, such as behaviour scoring systems and physiological markers, are increasingly refined through automated technologies and facial expression analysis. Advances in pharmacokinetics and drug delivery facilitate longer-lasting pain relief while reducing adverse effects. Globally, improved analgesic strategies are driven by both ethical imperatives and legislative change, with growing emphasis on welfare outcomes in farm, companion and wildlife veterinary practice. Despite progress, challenges remain in standardising pain assessment tools across species, optimising dosage regimens and ensuring equitable access to analgesics in low-resource settings.
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Pain Management in Veterinary Medicine publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in pain management in veterinary medicine across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Analgesia: the reduction or elimination of pain using pharmacological or non-pharmacological methods.
Local anaesthetic: a drug that blocks nerve conduction in a specific area to prevent pain during procedures.
NSAID: non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drug that reduces pain and inflammation by inhibiting cyclooxygenase enzymes.
Mechanical nociceptive threshold: the minimum force required to elicit a pain-related behavioural response when applied to tissue.
Infrared thermography: imaging technique that detects surface temperature variations to assess tissue damage or inflammation.
References
- Wound healing and pain sensitivity following caustic paste disbudding in dairy calves. Journal of Dairy Science (2023).
- Evolution of Local Temperature after Thermal Disbudding in Calves: A Preliminary Study. Agriculture (2024).
- Pain Management in Farm Animals: Focus on Cattle, Sheep and Pigs. Animals (2021).
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