Clinical Pearls

March 9, 2025

GI Anastomosis Tip

From ep 165 on our Surgery Stream. With Dr Tania Banks. What’s the trickiest bit of GI tract to suture when you’re doing an end-to-end anastomosis? It’s the mesenteric side, right? All that fat obscures your view, so you can&…

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March 5, 2025

Feline Transfusion Tip

From ep 154 on our ECC stream. With Dr Courtney Reddrop. So you’ve heard that you should not use peristalsis-type drip pumps or syringe pumps to administer red blood cells to dogs, because you’ll pop the cells. But here’s a r…

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March 2, 2025

Feline Constipation VS. Megacolon: How Much Poop is Too Much?

From a Science Week Session with Dr Tania Banks. You know when you look at a radiograph of a constipated cat and think, ‘that’s a lot of poop!’? Well, did you know that you can make a good prediction about future outcomes and…

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Feb. 26, 2025

The Very Sneaky, Very Scary NG Tube Complication

From episode 163 on the ECC feed. With Dr Abbie Tippler and Dr Ellie Leister. What do you think about the placement of this NG feeding tube?  Looks pretty good, right? Sitting nicely in the stomach.  What if I t…

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Feb. 23, 2025

Hotspots: Yes for steroids, nope for AB's

From episode 165 on the medicine feed. With Dr Nellie Choi. Our dermatology lecturer at uni tried hard to encourage us not just to reach for the pred for every skin case. And if bacteria was involved, then the preference was definitely to go w…

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Feb. 19, 2025

Why Neutrophils are like Spiderman

From episode 162 on the ECC feed. With Dr Avalene Tan. This is of no real practical relevance for most of us, but it’s too cool not to share! Dr Tan (who has a very useful website and newsletter that highlights the most exc…

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Feb. 16, 2025

Rhinoscopy Pro Tips

From episode 169 on our Medicine Stream. With Dr Johan Schoeman. How much do you love diagnostics for nasal disease? (Me neither.) Even if you do have a scope - it’s very hard to identify the problem area when the entire nose is filled w…

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Feb. 16, 2025

The Bubblogram

From episode 161 on the ECC feed. With Prof Mark Seitz. Maybe it’s a trauma patient, maybe it’s a blocked cat. Whatever the reason, sometimes when you see free fluid in the abdomen you want to check the integrity of the bladder wal…

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Feb. 12, 2025

Urine SG Misconceptions and Myths

From episode 75 on the medicine feed. With Prof Jill Maddison. I recently had a case that reminded me of these very important pearls about what I used to believe USG was telling me, and what we can actually deduce from it:  "Nor…

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Feb. 9, 2025

Another look at surgical margins for soft tissue sarcoma

From episode 156 on the Surgery Feed. With Dr. Brendan Janssens. “The 2 cm rule is completely irrelevant, and that has been shown in a couple of veterinary papers where the surgical dose was not predictive of outcome. You can take 5 cm a…

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Feb. 5, 2025

Injection Sites for Reptiles

From episode 158 on the ECC feed. With Dr. Doug Mader. I’m no reptile vet, but occasionally I have to treat one in an emergency. This was ALL news to me:  Reptiles have the renal portal system. That means that venous blood that…

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Feb. 2, 2025

The Relative Uselessness of Culture in those Annoying Otitis Cases

From episode 158 on the medicine feed. With Dr. Nellie Choi. You know when you get your ear culture results back, and it's filled with more R’s than a pirate convention? So now what? According to your results you are out of antibiotic op…

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Jan. 29, 2025

Fat Hangry Diabetic Cat Conundrum

From episode 122 on the Medicine Feed. With Dr. Linda Fleeman (also available now on the open-access podcasts) Here’s a conundrum in diabetic cats that diabetes guru Dr. Fleeman brought to light in this conversation:  Your untreated…

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Jan. 26, 2025

Autotransfusing Bleeding Cancer Spleen Patients

From episode 154 on the ECC stream. With Dr. Courtney Reddrop  If you’re not already doing auto-transfusions for your patients that have bled into a body cavity - why not? (This episode is the comprehensive guide on when and how to,…

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Jan. 22, 2025

Portosystemic Shunts: When the Bile Acids Don’t Make Sense

From episodes 151 and 152 on the Surgery Feed, with Prof Karen Tobias.  So you have your ‘usual suspect’ dog breed for a PSS, and you do a bile acid stim test. But the results come back a bit ‘meh.’ Like 60-somethi…

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Jan. 19, 2025

Cholestyramine and Rat Bait

From episode 149 on the ECC Feed with Nick Merwood and Kasra Ahmadi. Have you heard about using cholestyramine as a decontaminant for toxins that undergo enterohepatic recirculation? Here something important to know about cholestyram…

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Jan. 15, 2025

ALP Pearls

From episode 153 on the Medicine Feed. With Prof Jill Maddison. You already know about the common non-liver causes of increased ALP, like bone isomers in young animals, steroid or phenobarb-induced ALP in dogs, and of course those vague 'old-w…

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Jan. 12, 2025

When a Wood’s Lamp isn’t a Wood’s Lamp

From episode 158 on the Medicine Feed. With Dr. Nellie Choi. I’d kinda given up on Wood’s lamps when hunting for ringworm. I’ve taken hundreds of concerned cats with skin lesions into a dark room with my little portable UV light, …

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Jan. 8, 2025

Fentanyl Truth Bomb

From episode 151 on the ECC stream. With Dr Claire Sharp. We like fentanyl CRI’s because fentanyl is short-acting, which means you can quickly titrate the dose up and down to meet your patient’s needs. And when you switch it o…

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Jan. 5, 2025

How to Paralyse the Intestinal Tract?

From episode 152 on the ECC stream. With Dr Claire Sharp. I find them to be some of the most frustrating cases: you’ve fixed whatever it was that upset the gut in the first place, but now your patient’s GI tract has decided to…

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Jan. 1, 2025

Osteosarcoma Insights

From Episode 155 on the Medical Feed with Dr. Penny Thomas. I always feel a sense of urgency when I diagnose osteosarcoma. If the client wants to try treating, then I’m in a rush to cut the leg off, because it feels like that horrible thing i…

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Dec. 29, 2024

Cholestyramine for Toxin Decontamination

From episode 148 on the ECC Feed with toxicology experts, Nick Merwood and Kasra Ahmadi. We all know and love (hate?!) the black stuff that we shove down throats for our toxin ingestion cases to try to mop up some of the to…

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Dec. 25, 2024

Omeprazole Truth Bomb

From our Podcast Episode #112, with Prof. Caroline Mansfield. I don’t know about you, but at some stage it felt like all of our vomiting patients were getting Proton Pump Inhibitors, ‘just in case’ it helped a bit. We’v…

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Dec. 22, 2024

The FIP(Feline Infectious Peritonitis) cases that DON’T survive

From Episode 151 on the Medicine Stream With Dr. Sally Coggins Hopefully we all know by now that we can treat and cure FIP(Feline Infectious Peritonitis). But my conversation with FIP researcher Dr. Sally Coggins clarified some of the ini…

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