Internal Medicine encompasses quite a wide range of areas. This includes gastro-intestinal and liver diseases, hormonal conditions, genito-urinary problems, blood disorders, cardio-respiratory medicine, nutrition, infectious diseases and intensive/emergency care.
Medicine puts together the ‘clues’ to establish what your animal is suffering from and how best we can treat it. It also uses this information to let you know the prognosis of a condition i.e. how serious it is and what is likely to be the outcome.
Along with listening to the history of your animal’s condition and carefully examining them we use a lot of tools to help us. This involves specialists from other areas (e.g. cardiology, ophthalmology) but commonly involves blood testing, x-rays, ultrasound, endoscopy (fibre optic cameras) and various techniques for sampling body tissues! Common investigations are:
- Respiratory medicine including investigation of nasal discharge, cough , dyspnoea and exercise intolerance.
- Gastroenterology including investigation of chronic vomiting and diarrhoea.
- Hepatic disorders including hepatitis and portosystemic shunts.
- Endocrinology.
- Urinary tract disease.
- Infectious diseases.
- Haemolymphatic diseases including anaemia and thrombocytopenia.
- Immune mediated diseases.
- Oncology including treatment of lymphoma and leukaemia.
- Emergency medical cases requiring intensive care.
Like most areas of veterinary practice, developments are occurring continuously in medicine and it is very important to keep up to date. This means new or better ways to treat your animal are always emerging to enable us to the best possible standard of care.
