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Maybe this sounds like common sense. Maybe it’s borne out of a pet peeve of mine. But here it goes:Animals feel pain.Yes, you say, of course animals feel pain. But in the course of private practice I was dumbfounded on nearly a daily basis on the cues the typical pet owner rely upon to determine pain in their pets.Yowling, crying, whimpering, agitation, obsessive focus on the painful location are all obvious signs of pain. Yep, I can guarantee you if I grab a kitchen knife and stab your dog in the leg, it will hurt. And he will let you know with the stereotypical behavior I just mentioned. Yet in the absence of these very obvious signs of acute, intense pain, people fail to see when their pets are hurting.I cannot count the times owners have brought in a dog or cat that is three-legged lame. One leg is held up and not touching the ground. It is useless to the pet. Classic presenting complaint: “I don’t know what happened. He was using the leg yesterday, but he’s not today. But he’s not in pain.”OF COURSE HE IS IN PAIN! HE’S NOT USING THE LEG!If the dog is not howling in agony, the perception is that there is no pain. Trust me. That dog’s leg hurts. As soon as I press, push, or pull on the affected area that is causing him to hold the leg up, you will hear him tell me. Because humans are such wimps when we hurt, we equate stoicism with the absence of pain.Also, because as a veterinarian I do not see your pet on a daily basis, I may be able to see subtle changes that you may not notice. When I see your 12-year-old Labrador Retriever shuffling into the exam room, I see a dog who is suffering from chronic arthritic pain.“Mrs. Jones, I see Rover there is having some chronic pain issues. He’s lost muscle mass in his rear legs, and he’s got some obvious crepitus (grinding, popping, crunching) when I manipulate his hips and knees. Let’s try some anti-inflammatory and pain relieving medication to help him feel better.”“Oh no, no, no, Rover doesn’t need any of that! He feels fine! He’s never shown me any indication that he’s in pain! You’re trying to sell me something I don’t need!”Many of the drug companies used to give us supplies of sample packs of various NSAIDS (nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs). When they stopped doing so, our clinic made our own sample packs with educational literature. After several minutes of begging Mrs. Jones to just PLEASE take the FREE sample and give it to Rover for a week to appease me, she would leave with instructions to call me in a week with a progress report.Mrs. Jones, and many owners like her, would call back in a week, sometimes crying, at how amazed they were at the changes in their dogs. “He hasn’t chased his ball in over a year, and now he’s playing like a puppy!” “He’s needed a boost to get into my truck for months, and now he hops in with no effort!” “He was becoming a very picky eater and was snapping at my grandkids, but now he’s eating like a horse and playing tug-of-war with my grandson’s stuffed animals!”The problem with chronic pain is that you often don’t know it exists until it’s taken away.Don’t even get me started on cats. They are the masters at hiding their pain, yet they suffer from the same incidence of arthrits as dogs. Yep, they hurt too.Imagine having an invasive abdominal surgery, or a large tumor removed, or having a limb amputated and not having pain control afterwards. Hell, how about even a routine medical procedure like a hysterectomy with nothing for pain? We wouldn’t dream of such a concept in human medicine, but we ignored it for years in veterinary medicine.I started my career in veterinary medicine before we had amazing drugs for pain control. We used to euthanize old pets when immobility became a quality of life issue for them. We never employed pain control before or after surgery “because animals process pain differently”.No. No, they don’t.All the neurological receptors that detect pain are the same in humans and animals. All the physiological manifestations of, and bodily responses to, pain are the same. We whine and cry about it until we find a doctor to make it go away. Dogs and cats just have to deal with it.But they still feel it.Just like you do.

A year or two ago my ultrasonographer came to me after completing a 20-week ultrasound on one of my patients. She was concerned, because when she raised up the patient's shirt to put the ultrasound gel on, she noticed a pattern of bruises all over her abdomen. She brought me into the ultrasound room on the pretext that she needed my help completing the heart scan.The patient was there with her husband. As I put the ultrasound probe on her abdomen I noticed numerous small dark bruises in various locations across her abdomen. I lightly inquired about these bruises (which was not ideal since her husband is in the room).They both laughed as if it were the funniest thing they'd ever experienced, and explained that their large German Shepherd dog jumped on her several times over the weekend but now he was going to be an outside dog.Well that didn't make a da*m bit of sense.I had her come out to the restroom to give me another urine sample, and instead took her into my office and asked her alone if she were being abused.She vehemently denied it.Well, her story about the injury was implausible, but that was as far as I could take it."Let us know if there's any way we can ever help you," is what I finally said.Two weeks later she returned for her next obstetric visit without her husband and with her mother.Our suspicions were correct. A few days before that ultrasound visit, her husband had beat the crap out of her focusing his rage on her abdomen.Pregnancy is actually one of the most likely times in a woman's life to be physically abused. Often, the abuser concentrates their rage toward the pregnant abdomen. Placental abruption (separation of the placenta from the uterus) can lead to fetal and maternal death. Bone fractures in the fetus have even been reported after abuseCredit Sonography & Ultrasound ResourcesI think a significant amount of abuse goes undetected and unreported. We often know when the story about an injury doesn't make much sense, but in the absence of any confirmation by the abused it's difficult to get the real story.Warning: If you are an abuser taking some relief at my last statement, just remember, the truth comes out eventually.

Well, there is this thing called the International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service - IERS, that keeps track with extremely high precision of the movements of the Earth, including speed of rotation and the variances in the position of the North and South Poles.This is their site:IERSThe produce a weekly report of movements of the Poles using celestial sources that are very far from Earth, are very stable and can be pinpointed with accuracy using Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) and atomic clocks.Very-long-baseline interferometry - WikipediaAtacama Observatory, one of the stations used to check for variations in position of the Poles using VLBIThis is one of the atomic clocks used that works with a fountain of cesiumAtomic fountain - WikipediaVLBI works by measuring the interference between sources of radio at very different positions: it is like parallax measurements on steroids.For that to work, we have different satellites: the more exact, because is far away from Earth, is the Spektr R radio telescope Russian satellite that moves up to 390.000 km from Earth at apogee.Spektr R radio telescope: it goes beyond the MoonIt works together with Atacama radio dishes and Maui observatory in Hawaii to create a huge pair of eyes that can discern 3-D, like when you use 3-D glasses at a movie, but very, very, very precise.The precision of Spektr R is millionths of arc-second: those familiar with angular resolution will understand.Now, the results: the variations in Pole position from day to day (Mean Julian Day or MJD) are really tiny.For example, the change in longitude from the “starting position” of the Poles, when measurements started, calculated for Julian day 58366, is -115.94 milliseconds of arc.That is around 3.5 meters.The change in latitude is smaller: for the same day is 11.56 milliseconds of arc, which is like 40 centimeters.From day to day (check day 58366 in the following image of the weekly report of IERS) Pole position can change 0.001 milliseconds in latitude and 0.021 milliseconds of arc in longitude.That means that the Poles move in one day around 0,63 millimeters, which, in English, means the Poles move about half the size of a pinhead from day to day.Atomic clocks give you crazy precision: imagine detecting movements of the Poles that are less than a millimeter using instruments that are in Chile, Hawaii and the Moon.This means those instruments have to be perfectly synchronized for you to receive the radio waves from stars at millions of light year from you and compare the waves.This is a sample of the report of IERS. The Pole movements are under the columns marked “dx” and “dy”There are regularities in Polar motion, caused by the Moon and the Sun influences on an Earth that is not perfectly round and in which the crust moves by plate tectonics, plus the Chandler wobble plus nutation plus precession of the equinoxes.Polar motion in milliarcseconds as function of Julian day since January 1, 2000. Notice that they move up to 0.5 arc seconds.You can read more here:Polar motion - WikipediaWithout the guys at IERS modern cartography would not be possible.The XXIth century is amazing for mapmakers: I would not be able to make precise maps if the people at IERS did not know the position of the Earth axis, which is the origin of coordinates I use, with precision of hundredths of a millimeter.In the following image you can see my team working in the field : if the car is immobile they can know their positions, in seconds, with less than 1 millimeter of error along 50 km of road.If the equipment could not take the information for ephemeris, or the data from IERS, I would not be able to reach that precision, as the latitude and longitude of the Poles would vary more than half my expected errorWithout the information of the position of the Pole I would have to rely in older methods, like theodolites or laser measurements that would make my work much more expensive.When the team is moving along the road, they know where they are with less than 10 cm of error and they store the information second by second.The antenna on top of the car receives the GPS signals and inside the car is the “rover” GPS apparatusI also use Base driven corrections (although the base and rover pair of instruments do not use interferometry)In the following picture you can see my base, in the middle of a plantain field that allows the team to get this kind of millimetric precision (instead of the 15 meters error you typically get from your smart phone GPS)It is not Spektr R, but it works very well.This thingie use information relayed by satellite from the atomic clock in the picture I showed before: as it is immobile, any movement in position reported by this GPS is a fake movement, caused by error from the GPS satellite, that I can “deduct” from the rover position reported by the GPS in the carThis doesn't mean I cannot get 1 cm in error using older optical means: 30 years ago I could trace frontiers with that kind of precision using the stars, like the people at IRS does (albeit closer stars, bright in the sky), a lot of math and ephemeris tables published in Greenwich.In the following image you can see my old Keuffel and Esser theodolite with a Seagmuller solar attachment, made in 1932This thing works marvels, it is beautiful, and, if you give me time, a good table of logarithms, a good thermometer and barometer to deduct refraction of light and time to look at the stars at night, I cannot beat Spektr R, but I can come close to tell you where the Pole is, with less than a finger width in error.The downside is that I have to be actually at the Pole, freezing my behind and, yes, it has a compass to check for the magnetic Pole, but I do not use it for knowing where I am as it gives you degree-order precision, which is like 110 km error.Not even Juan de la Cosa, Columbus navigator, had that kind of error, because he did not use the compass to navigate: the compass is used to steer the ship, but to navigate is to know where you are.The pilot steers, the navigator tells the pilot where to steer, because he uses other methods to know where the ship is, that is, the navigator navigates.Old school astronomers and cartographers knew very well where the Pole was.It is an ancient and vital profession, or so navigators think.