Advanced multimodal pain protocols for feline surgery integrate preoperative, intraoperative, and postoperative analgesia for comprehensive perioperative welfare coverage.
Advanced multimodal analgesia represents the current gold standard for feline perioperative welfare — recognizing that pain involves multiple pathways requiring multiple targeted interventions rather than a single drug. The preemptive component is particularly important: analgesia begun before surgery reduces the central sensitization that makes subsequent pain harder to control, producing better post-operative welfare with less medication than reactive post-operative treatment alone. The shift from single-drug to multimodal protocols in feline anesthesia over the past decade represents genuine welfare progress — more cats now recover from surgery with adequate pain control than at any previous time in veterinary medicine.