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The goal of maintenance fluid therapy in small animals is to replace normal ongoing losses of water and salts when oral intake is withheld. Hospitalized dogs and cats may have multiple stimuli for antidiuretic hormone release that disrupt normal osmoregulation and predispose to water retention. Severe illness promotes retention of both sodium and water as edema. Commercially available fluids have electrolyte concentrations that are very different from dietary maintenance requirements, and potential consequences include development of hypoosmolality, edema, or both when excesses of water or sodium are administered. Suggestions for tailoring fluid administration toward specific goals are provided.

Acute pain reliably accompanies severe illness and injury, and when sufficiently severe, it can complicate the recovery of critically ill patients. Because acute pain is closely tied to the neurologic process of nociception, pharmacologic therapy is often essential and effective. This update focuses on two methods of treatment of acute pain—local anesthetic infusion and continuous intravenous infusion of multimodal agents—that can be layered on top of standard care with other drugs.

Background:There are no validated systems for measuring pain from osteoarthritis in cats.

Emergency/critical care is a new veterinary specialty that poses special challenges in veterinary education. Traditional methods of teaching emergency procedures in the teaching hospital place novices in a high-stress, high-stakes environment not conducive to learning or to optimum patient care. Our innovative emergency-procedures laboratory enables students to acquire a high degree of proficiency, in a realistic setting, with focused, controlled instruction and practice, replicable in schools with or without emergency/critical care facilities.

The ability to characterize disease of the respiratory tract accurately based on breathing pattern is helpful for the development of differential diagnoses and an efficient diagnostic plan and critical for the stabilization of patients in respiratory distress. Veterinary students do not have sufficient clinical experience to observe personally all types of respiratory diseases and their resultant abnormal breathing patterns. We developed a teaching tool, the animated breathing pattern videotape (ABV), to fill this gap. The ABV is a collection of video clips of small animal patients with normal and abnormal breathing patterns on a conventional videotape of approximately 20 minutes duration. Each video clip is shown for 20 to 40 seconds, followed by the same clip with superimposed animation of rib and diaphragm motion, followed by the initial clip again, without overlying animation. The ABV has since been used in teaching third-year veterinary students, interns, residents, practicing veterinarians, and veterinary technicians. Student evaluations and responses to questionnaires by interns, residents, practicing veterinarians, veterinary technicians, and peer reviewers have been uniformly positive.

Objective:To characterize the relationship between clinical estimates of hydration in dogs and cats admitted to an intensive care unit (ICU) and changes in their body weight following 24–48 hours of fluid therapy.

Objective:To characterize the indications and techniques for catheterization of the epidural space to treat pain in dogs and cats in a veterinary teaching hospital intensive care unit, and describe the analgesic regimens used in those patients. To provide a detailed description of the technique of epidural catheterization in companion animals.

Stewart’s strong ion difference, first introduced more than 10 years ago, offers an innovative approach for the analysis of nonrespiratory acid-base disorders. This article addresses the concept of strong ion difference and discusses its clinical applications. A brief review of base excess and anion gap is also included. Clinical cases are provided to demonstrate a step-by-step method using strong ion difference to evaluate nonrespiratory acid-base imbalances.

Urinary catheter placement in dogs may be necessary for certain surgical procedures or for treatment of certain conditions. This column describes the vaginoscopic placement of an indwelling female urinary catheter and possible complications of catheter placement.

Hundreds of thousands of animals are presented to US veterinarians annually for surgery or for evaluation of painful disease. This large population offers the opportunity for clinical research of both acute and chronic pain syndromes. Although there is growing interest by veterinary clinical specialists to explore the nature of animal pain and how best to treat it, this resource is relatively unknown to the pain research community. Computer-assisted collection of behavioral data has created new opportunities for characterizing the pain experience in animal species for the benefit of both animals and humans. This review describes the current state of veterinary clinical pain studies in dogs and an application of computer-assisted behavioral analysis.