Brian Beale talks orthopedic surgery and Animal ER on Nat Geo

Subscribe to The Vet Blast Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Brian Beale, DVM, DACVS, shared his wisdom on orthopedic surgery on this episode of The Vet Blast Podcast with Adam Christman, DVM, MBA. Beale explains the benefits of arthroscopy and how it can help give clinicians a better view of what's happening to their patients

Brian Beale, DVM, DACVS: I'm so passionate about arthroscopy and I love working with my partners, the general veterinarians. Arthroscopy is kind of like walking around the joint and taking a look around inside the joint so you can see everything in a fluid medium and very magnified. It's kind of like the movie Fantastic Voyage, way back in 1966, where they're kind of cruising around the body in a submarine.

Specifically, how can this help us with our animals? Well, let's take the knee. Hind limb lameness is very common. Cruciate disease, for instance, that's most common cause of hind limb lameness. What arthroscopy can do is, in a very minimally invasive manner, we can slide a scope in through a 1-cm incision and diagnose a complete or partial cruciate tear. And we can determine much better if there's a meniscal tear.

We can see much better with the scope than we can with our eyes. You know, as far as the front leg goes, it's great. For the shoulder, front limb lameness is very confusing for a lot of veterinarians and maybe you yourself get frustrated. What is it? Is it the shoulder or is it the elbow? And so in the shoulder, we can stick the scope in, we can tell if it's [Osteochondritis Dissecans] and remove the flap. Or we can tell if it's a ligament tear or rotator cuff tendon injury and elbow dysplasia. We can go in and remove the fragments as well.

Listen to the full podcast for more: