Dear Zara,
I love visiting the vet. But, like many cats, sometimes I need medicine to keep me calm.
I talked about that with my friend Lais Malavasi. She’s a veterinarian at Washington State University.
She told me about two kinds of calming medicine. Vets and human doctors use them to reduce pain and fear.
Sedatives make patients feel relaxed and sleepy. But they’re mostly aware of what’s going on. When the medicine wears off, they’ll probably have fuzzy memories.
Anesthesia makes patients unconscious. They can’t feel pain or move. They aren’t aware of what’s going on. When they wake up, they won’t remember anything.
Sometimes patients need both kinds of medicine.
Sedatives work because of how nerve cells in the brain send and receive messages.
“Everything in our body is electrical,” Malavasi said. “Sedation basically decreases electrical activity in specific areas of the brain.”
In the brain, messages pass from one nerve cell to another. Each nerve cell has branches that stick out. They’re covered with proteins called receptors. A nerve cell uses those receptors to catch messages from other nerve cells.
Then the nerve cell uses electricity to shoot that message down its long tail. That’s where it passes the message to another brain cell.
Everything we think, do or feel happen because of those messages.
Sedatives latch onto some of those message receptors. They send a message telling the nerve cells to take a break. They make it harder for nerve cells to send and receive other messages. That makes the muscles relax. It makes patient feels calm and sleepy. It lasts until the medicine wears off.
Nobody is sure exactly how anesthesia works in the brain. It’s a mystery scientists are still solving.
Dr. Malavasi told me that veterinarians and doctors use the same calming medicines. They just give different amounts.
Sometimes they use different kinds of medicine for different patients. You mentioned an endoscope. That’s a tube with a camera that looks inside the digestive system.
A doctor can talk with their human patients. They might just use a sedative to make the patient relaxed and comfortable.
A vet can’t talk with their patients the same way. It’s more like when doctors treat baby humans.
“I can’t tell most cats not to swallow or bite the endoscope,” Malavasi said. “They’ll never listen. So, I have to fully anesthetize to do such procedures.”
That’s also why vets look for clues their patients feel pain or fear. They monitor heart rate, blood pressure and other things. They learn how different animals hold their faces and bodies when something hurts.
They use all that information to keep their patients safe and comfortable.
Sincerely,
Dr. Universe