3 Jun 2026
Vets shouldn’t try to do everyone else’s jobs when dealing with osteoarthritis cases, a major conference has been told.
Allister Webb
Job Title
Stuart Carmichael.
Veterinary professionals have been urged to help deliver an “operational overhaul” in the treatment and management of osteoarthritis (OA).
The plea was made at the Veterinary Osteoarthritis Alliance’s (VOA) annual congress as work to develop a single operational plan for tackling the disease continues.
Officials hope to begin testing the new model among their members in the coming months and encouraged delegates at the Loughborough event to join that “mission”.
But alliance co-founder Stuart Carmichael also used his keynote address to warn clinicians not to seek rapid solutions for their OA cases.
He said: “This is not a disease that offers a quick solution.
“Chronic disease needs time and that’s a problem we have got to solve. We need an operational overhaul.”
Prof Carmichael argued clinicians needed to act as an integrated team to deliver such a plan, but warned change was essential to it as he urged vets not to try to do other professionals’ jobs as well as their own. He also bemoaned a lack of OA progress during his career.
He said: “I’ve been at this for 45 years and this is my great frustration. I’m still here talking about the same things I was talking about 30 years ago.”
Although public OA discourse has focused of late on specific, high-profile treatments, hopes have been raised of further treatment advances following the reporting of encouraging pilot data from stem cell therapies in the US.
Meanwhile, RVC-led research has indicated the use of high resolution 3D bone mapping techniques could allow the disease to be identified at a much earlier stage in both dogs and humans alike.
The paper, published in the Osteoarthritis and Cartilage journal, found there were predictable changes to bone structure in the disease’s earliest stages in what they think could be a vital advance towards earlier detection in dogs.
Prof Carmichael also highlighted the pre-clinical stage of OA as a time when the disease could potentially be reversed if identified, as he argued it should also be regarded more as a progressive welfare issue.
He said a key objective of treatment should be to delay the onset of disease to give patients more quality life, telling delegates: “If we reach this early, we can do something about it.”
But he warned there was currently insufficient emphasis on disease assessment as he urged vets to prescribe on the basis of assessments and adjust their approach as necessary based on continuing assessments.
He also urged clinicians to “think of the risk to the dog, not to yourself” as he described being shocked by research findings suggesting owner hostility to the use of non-steroidal drugs.
He said: “Why do they hate them? Because we tell them they’re horrible drugs and we don’t use them because we’re more scared of the risks than the owners are. What chance has the dog got?
“We have to look at this and ask if this is part of the job we’re not doing well.”