Question: how do you help animals get better

Melissa Upjohn answered on 16 Oct 2025:

To help animals get better as a vet I have to examine the animal so that I can work out what’s wrong with them. When you go to the doctor, they can ask you questions to try to work out what might be wrong with you and then they might also examine you, for example they might take your temperature or listen to you heart or to your breathing. They might also do tests on your blood or your urine (wee). We can do similar things for animals, but of course, we can’t explain to them what we’re doing, so we rely on talking to the animal’s owner to ask them lots of questions about about the animal and to help the owner understand what we need to do to figure out what’s wrong and, hopefully, make things better. As we can’t explain things to the animal we have to make sure that when we touch them we recognise that they might be scared (meeting a new person, the vet, who they don’t know) or they might be in pain, so we have to handle them as gently as possible. A vet is often helped by a vet nurse who’s got lots of experience in handling animals and recognising when they’re scared or in pain.