Pain Relief
In recent years, in both medical and veterinary professions, pain relief for traumatic, surgical and disease-related pain (e.g. cancer pain) has become much more effective and no-one, be they man or beast, should expect to suffer severe or prolonged pain during the course of their clinical treatment.
Topcat Metrology has played a part in this advance. The company began ten years ago when Dr Polly Taylor, a veterinary anaesthetist and Dr Michael Dixon, a scientist specialising in measurement techniques, joined forces to develop a method for assessing the analgesic effect of opioids (morphine-like drugs) in cats.
The project was successful, contributing to the licensing of buprenorphine as an analgesic for cats in the UK. Since then, Topcat has developed a range of threshold evaluation equipment, allowing researchers to quantify their assessments of analgesia. Most of our systems are now wireless, allowing the animals to be free-ranging and thus behaving naturally. Our most recent advance is the ProD, a hand-held palpometer for post-operative assessment in a clinical setting.
Looking behind the measurement
Good measurement is difficult! It is very easy, with technology all around us, to measure something, often with a piece of equipment borrowed from another lab, or another discipline, and to produce numbers that look plausible…even encouraging.
But not necessarily meaningful. Or aim is always to look behind the required measurement, to figure out what is really going on, and then to design equipment that is appropriate. Put another way, we aim to generate data with significant figures that really are significant.
Part of this is education. The physical principles bound up in our measurements are basic, but easily forgotten, or mis-interpreted if you don’t use them regularly. So we provide full training, both on the use of our equipment and on the underlying science.
In Feb 2010 we gave a series of lectures across Australia, spanning Sydney, Adelaide and Perth on three successive nights and in September of the same year hosted the training day at the AVA meeting in Santorini. Together with Dr Craig Johnson of Massey University, New Zealand, and Dr Louisa Slingsby of Bristol Veterinary School we presented a program entitled “The pitfalls of Measurement”