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4 Recent Veterinary Innovations that Changed Patient Care

Sep 8, 2023

Plumb's

 

 

Veterinary knowledge is constantly growing and changing. And unless the ink is barely dry on your diploma you’ve probably seen new drugs, treatment regimens, diagnostics, and even new diseases arise since graduation.

Here are 4 advances veterinary medicine has seen within the last 5 years alone:

  1. New insights into disease pathogenesis When many of you graduated from veterinary school, the toxic component in grapes and raisins was still unknown and had perplexed veterinarians for years. But in 2021, the toxin was found to be tartaric acid, the amount of which varies depending on the variety and maturity of the fruit.

Interestingly, cooked grapes and raisins are less likely to cause acute kidney injury because heat causes tartaric acid to decompose.

  1. New hope for previously untreatable diseases

Feline infectious peritonitis (FIP) is a disease you all dread diagnosing. It’s not easy telling a pet owner that their kitten has a fatal disease with no hope for successful treatment.

But within the last 5 years, novel antiviral therapies have been developed that are effective and curative for FIP, including the nucleoside analog GS-441524 and the protease inhibitor GC376.

  1. New ways to monitor familiar diseases

Performing blood glucose curves on anxious patients in a clinical environment can be challenging. But the small, portable continuous interstitial glucose monitoring systems utilized in human medicine have recently become available in veterinary medicine. They allow the collection of blood glucose readings with minimal stress to pets or their owners.

  1. New ways to communicate with clients

The popularity of veterinary telemedicine has surged in the past few years, particularly since the onset of COVID-19. Telemedicine appointments can be more convenient for pet owners and a big help for anxious patients.

But those appointments mean less contact with veterinary staff and fewer opportunities for clients to ask questions. Clear, concise pet owner education materials that supplement tele- medicine appointments and ensure all your client’s questions are answered can be very helpful.

Advances like these mean the resources that were on our desks or computer screens 5 years ago no longer contain all the information we need to treat our patients.

That’s why Plumb’s has expanded its essential veterinary drug reference, Plumb’s Veterinary Drugs. Their new digital reference, Plumb’s Pro, is a clinical decision support tool that helps veterinarians navigate this rapid expansion of knowledge and stay current. It compiles essential, continually updated diagnostic and treatment information on a website and mobile app that can be used from any internet-connected device.

It also contains all the drug information from Plumb’s Veterinary Drugs as well as pet owner handouts that can be easily printed or emailed directly from the app after an in-person or telemedicine appointment.

As a CVMA member, you get an exclusive discount on Plumb’s ProTM (USD $599/year, normally $948/year). Or you can opt for prescribing support only with Plumb’s Veterinary Drugs® (USD $99/year, normally $129/year).

Contact the CVMA at (admin@cvma-acmv.org) to obtain the CVMA discount code and let Plumb’sTM help you stay up-to-date.