| Give your arthritic dog Rimadyl - CLICK HERE for the Pet Manual Forum Home Page |
| spring |
This forum has so much negative, and poorly informed, stuff on Rimadyl it's easy to lose sight of what we're trying to do for dogs:
1 Arthrits is very common in dogs
2 Dogs have evolved to show minimal outward signs of pain; it loses them pack status. This means of you see your dog lame it's probably hurting a lot more than you think.
3 We owe it to our loved pets to treat the pain. Rimadyl, and other similar medicines, relieve the pain. Given that dogs do not show signs of mild pain and arthritis never goes away there's a good case for life-long treatment.
4 There are no effective alternatives to Rimadyl that have been shown to be any safer. They ALL have risks of side-effects. Actually the side-effects are quite rare. British vets have had these "NSAIDs" for a while and geenrally know how to use them. The golden rule is that IF YOUR DOG BECOMES UNWELL STOP GIVING THE NSAID. If the problem was caused by the NSAID it will normally get better. Of course at this stage you don't know if the unwellness was caused by the NSAID or not. Your vet can make that judgement.
5 There's lots of hype at the moment about a US law suit against Rimadyl. It's worth reminding ourselves that in the US people are always suing each other, and especially big companies. It looks from the press release that this case did not even get granted "class action" status, which normally means it was pretty weak. Big companies tend to pay off these people rather than go to the vast expense of going through all the legal processes. So let's not get too exercised about the legal suit, just focus on doing the right thing for your dog: if he/she has arthritis, give him/her some pain relief.
For what it's worth I didn't know any of this until my dog got arthritis. I don't want other peoples' dogs to suffer like I fear mine did until I realised how much relief she could get from treatment.
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