How will my veterinarian gauge whether my dog is in pain?

A good physical exam. Again, if you had an ear infection, it would be painful. We also know that if a dog has an ear infection or an eye infection, those would be signs of pain. We’re trained to determine the causes of pain or to determine if your pet is in pain. And it’s our job to alleviate pain and suffering, so we take a good history. For example, if you tell us every time the dog walks, like halfway into their walk, they can hardly use their back leg, but when they first start, they're fine—this helps us determine the source of pain. Along with getting the dog’s history, we may take x-rays. We're going to do a physical exam and get to the root of the problem.

There's some standardized scoring we can use. Colorado State Vet School came up with a pretty standard pain scale we tend to use for our surgical patients or our patients that come into the hospital. Sometimes it's as obvious as your pet comes in limping, and we know exactly what the pain source is, and we can gauge from there. But for those more subtle injuries, we want to go back to the dog’s original normal and make sure we're managing their pain well.

With a physical exam. It’s what we do, all day, every day. When you see dogs for a living, you get very used to seeing what normal is. You can read body language. You can read the posture of the tail, the posture of the dog. How are they standing? How are they moving? What's their facial expression? Are their ears up and perky? It starts with a basic observation and then when you put your hands on them. Again, pain is such a vague word. The pain of what? If they come in three-legged, well hello, that's where the problem is, so we're going to start on that leg. But if they come in just kind of not moving right and a bit sore, we have to start looking. You can check the range of motion. You can check the neck, the spine, the hip, etc., as It's what we we’re trained to do.

And in some cases we’ll need an x-ray to tell you, "Oh, that spot equals pain." But sometimes, you can see lesions on an x-ray to where you know that's a painful process that's going on. Sometimes we might need additional tests beyond just a physical exam. But I would say about pain, 90% of it is probably recognition and a hands-on physical exam.

We'll do a physical exam. We'll put our hands all over the dog, move the dog's neck, and move its legs and feet. We look for a vocalization. We also look for arthritis, which can manifest as almost a crunching feel in the joints. We assess the overall body condition of the dog and how the dog moves, and things like that. That may prompt us to talk to you about x-rays and similar things to assess further.