Pet Orthopaedics or Bone Surgery

Our veterinary surgeon at Chiang Mai Chotana Animal Hospital has been well-trained and a long experience and skill in performing variety cases of both soft tissue and bone surgery in dogs and cats. Obviously, he is one of the best surgeons in Chiang Mai. In addition to our success in this career we all love and have compassion for pets. We fully understand it’s quite difficult for you to make a decision for your pet to receive any kind of surgery.

Even though we are confident in our team work, knowledge, skill, facility and anesthetic machine, we very well understand that it’s hard for you to let your pet be operated for any purpose. That is why we have to do our best to set up steps and protocol for every cases of bone surgery in dogs and cats in order to ensure that your pet is comfortable and free from any stress as much as possible. Maybe the most important step prior to the surgery is the discussion of why we believe specific protocol is necessary and what does it comprise of? And we also prepare information regarding appropriate after care and answers to every question to make you realize that you do the right thing. We believe in specific care for each individual patient and owner, personal relationship and our experiences which make our surgery services quite unique.

To prepare your pet for bone surgery, we ask that you please withhold food from your pet 12 hours before the procedure, although please provide fresh water right up until the time you bring him into our hospital.

Protocol for Sterile Bone Surgery Technique

Before any surgical procedure your pet will routinely get physical examination and blood work done to ensure that there is no risk associated with your pet health in general anesthesia.

All Instruments and surgical drapes for use in surgery will be autoclave – sterilized at our premise. This standard of practice normally implements in human hospital makes our surgical operation far less risk of microorganism contamination.

Anesthetic Protocol and Pain management program

Postoperative care is very important for the success of surgical operation and pet welfare. We believe in pain management. Pet animal are not able to verbally tell us how much pain they are suffering from the surgery. So every pet operated must receive appropriate pain management whether or not the sign of pain show up.

In fact there is pain in every surgical operation (changing behavior is noticeable). This affects pet‘s mental condition and prolongs the process of healing further more. We at Chiang Mai Chotana Animal hospital put all efforts to manage and relieve pain from surgical operation as much as possible.

We also believe in the important of warm pad for maintaining of pet body temperature during and after the surgery. This warm pad makes pet feel more comfortable, hastens the healing process, relieves the pain and decreases the secondary infection and speed up recovery from anesthetic condition. At our practice we use electrical warm pad for this purpose in every case during and after the surgery.

We here at Chiang Mai Chotana Animal hospital are ready to provide Veterinary Orthopaedic Surgery service whenever the unexpected event of accident occurs to your beloved pets.

Techniques for Treament of Fractured Bone

There are 4 techniques as follw:

Applying a cast

This technique needs no surgery and a cast can be applied to the leg to treat certain fracture and complications consequently ensue; however, many fractures will require surgical intervention.

Applying a cast for fractured bone treatment

Pinning

This is a surgical technique whereby a long stainless steel rod is inserted into the middle of the bone. The rod traverses the fractured area.

Pining and wiring for fractured bone treatment

Plating

This is a surgical technique whereby a flat stainless steel ‘plate’ is attached to the bone using screws on either side of the fracture.

Plating for fractured bone treatment

External fixation

This is a technique used to stabilize fractures with a series of pins on the outside of the leg that pass through the skin and into the bone on either side of the fracture.

External Fixation for Fractured Bone treatment

External Fixation for Fractured Bone treatment

List below the bone surgery procedures we are competent to and regularly perform.

Please be noted that our service doesn’t limit to just this list.

Applying a cast

This technique a cast is applied to the leg to treat certain fracture but complications quite often seen.

Pining

This is a surgical technique whereby a long stainless steel rod is inserted into the middle of the bone. The rod traverses the fracture area for stabilizing purpose.

Plating

This is a more effective surgical technique whereby a flat stainless steel “plate” is attached to the bone using screws on either side of the fracture. This technique is far more effective than pining in term of fractured bone stabilization and healing.

External Fixation

This procedure is particularly indicated for open wound fracture and can also be applied to any fractures. This is a technique used to stabilize fractures with a series of pins on the outside of the leg that pass through the skin and into the bone on either side of the fracture.

Pelvic Fracture repaired with a bone Plate and lag screw

This is a surgical technique for treatment of pelvic fracture whereby a bone plate is attached to the bone using screws on either side of the fracture. This method would repair the birth canal structure otherwise will end up with narrow birth canal. In bitch this would make birth process impossible. Some untreated pet will develop constipation later in life.

$Pelvic fracture before$

Before

After

Femoral head and neck excision

This is a surgical technique whereby broken head and neck of femur are totally removed and end up developing to be a fault joint. This technique works well for dog under 15 kilograms body weight.

Part of Femoral head to be removed.

After femoral head and neck being removed.

Treatment of Patellar Luxation

This is a surgical technique for treatment of patellar luxation whereby a cartilaginous groove at the end of the femur at the stifle is surgically carved out deeper so the patella will remain in the groove with movement.

Patellar Luxations (5 and 6)

Carving out a deeper groove

Treatment of cranial cruciate ligament rupture

This is a surgical procedure for repairing of cranial cruciate ligament rupture. The treatment will bring back quality of life to your pet in term of normal movement instead of limping or intermittently non-weight bearing.

Amputation

In case pet’s leg gets seriously injured or infected and amputation is the only option, we are readily available to save your pet life.

This post is also available in: Thai