Veterinary pain management has advanced substantially, with new pharmacological options and better understanding of pain assessment enabling more effective treatment across species.
Veterinary pain management has been transformed in the past two decades by the combination of validated assessment tools and expanded pharmacological options. The recognition that pain was systematically undertreated — in part because clinicians lacked objective ways to detect it — drove the development of grimace scales and structured pain scoring systems that now enable evidence-based treatment decisions. Multimodal analgesia, which combines drugs acting through different mechanisms, achieves better pain control with lower doses of individual agents, reducing side effect risks. Local anaesthetic nerve blocks, standard in human surgery, remain underused in veterinary practice despite clear evidence of benefit. Extending effective pain management to all species — including farm animals and fish — remains an ongoing challenge for the profession.