Veterinary Cryosurgery | Is it Perfect for Your Practice?

Improve First-Time Success Rates and Increase Profits

Most days veterinarians will see elderly patients whose lumps and bumps drive their owners crazy. Veterinary cryosurgery is an immediately available option for this, but when asked to remove them, the veterinarian often asks the patient’s owner to wait for a dental visit.

During the dental appointment, the lesions may be removed with a scalpel or electrocautery. The bad news with this approach is that it adds to the cost of the dental and the patient runs the risk of infection once they go home… and who can forget the look on the patient when you make them wear that cone.

An alternative that all vets know but may not have properly used is veterinary cryosurgery. The physiology of dogs and cats allows for aggressive use of cryosurgery without the risk of causing blisters and open wounds. Thus making it a quick effective way to treat warts and small skin tumors.

Cryosurgery results in the destruction of the target lumps and bumps but after the treatment, a scab sloughs off rather than an open wound.  After cryosurgery, the busy practice can even video chat with the patient’s owner to check and see how the lesion healing process is progressing.

In this article, you will learn about new advances in cryosurgery product designs that will increase the first-time success rate of cryosurgery for benign lesions and how these new cryo devices will increase profits for the practice.

How to Properly use Veterinary Cryosurgery With Companion and Equine Patients | Protocols

Performing veterinary cryosurgery wrong is pretty easy to do. Under treat using a cryogen that is too warm. Or you don’t apply it for an appropriate amount of time. Another common mistake is not using multiple freeze/thaw cycles.

Now, if you want to be successful follow these key steps as an example when treating a wart or papilloma:

• Select a product that delivers an extreme cold gas that is less than -50^oC to assure tissue destruction¹
• Second: freeze the lesion for 30 seconds and then let it thaw to flesh color
• Third: Repeat the freeze-thaw 1-3 or more times²

When you are done with the application of intense cold treatment send the patient home and ask the owner to watch for the scab to fall off in 2-3 weeks. One properly done freeze session is all it takes to remove or significantly reduce any common benign lesion. Other protocols for treating eyelid tumors and the like are also easy to resolve with veterinary cryosurgery.

The good news for the practice is also the additional revenue that can be realized when patients and their owners don’t need to wait for a dental. Now, this blog was written to also tell you about a new generation of products that also make cryosurgery effective,  easy to perform, and more comfortable for the veterinarian and patient.

Veterinary Cryo Devices That Do it Right

One of the historical drawbacks of cryo devices (mainly portable pen-like devices or small aerosol canisters), is that they all rely on small gas cartridges that deliver a limited amount of cryogen. Or worse, gas splatters all over when you spray into a cone held over the lesion. So, you might get to treat 2 to 4 lesions with a small cartridge, or the veterinarian and the patient have collateral freezing damage spraying into a cone.  Using either technology increases the difficulty of using cryosurgery while driving up the disposable costs and hassle factor.

If you were starting from scratch and wanted to develop the next best cryosurgical device what features would be on your list?  High on your list would be that your new cryo unit would use cryogens that are immediately less than -50^oC to assure cell destruction.  This is solved using Nitrous Oxide which reaches -89^oC or newer refrigerants which are immediately -52^oC.  

Next, you would want a device that can hold a large supply of gas so you can drive down the cost per treatment and minimize the headache of constantly re-ordering new gas cartridges.  Ideally, your new product will provide many treatments and be portable so it can travel between treatment rooms and be easy-to-store.

Finally, the ideal device would deliver a precise dispense of cryogen to minimize collateral damage of healthy tissue, including the veterinarians doing the treatment-NO SPLATTERING.  So, the delivery method of best surgical techniques should be flexible and employ a spray, bud, or a cone in a design that, oh yes, can be operated using one hand.

The good news is that several new devices for veterinary cryosurgery that meet all of the items on the wish list above are now available to the large and small vet practice.