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Vets got it wrong more often than the owners did.This is the placebo effect in dogs, except the dog isn’t the one being ...
03/09/2026

Vets got it wrong more often than the owners did.

This is the placebo effect in dogs, except the dog isn’t the one being fooled.

Dogs can’t form an expectation about a capsule. They don’t know they’ve been given anything. And expectation is supposed to be the whole mechanism in humans.

So what’s actually happening?

Partly it’s us. In 58 dogs on placebo, owners reported their dog was better 39.7% of the time. Vets: 44.8%. Force-plate gait analysis said 46 of those 58 hadn’t changed at all. The longer the trial ran, the stronger the effect got.

And partly the dog probably does improve a bit, just not from the capsule. Starting a treatment usually means shorter walks, more rest, a new bed, some weight off, an owner suddenly watching how the dog gets up off the floor. I don’t know how much of the 39.7% is that, and I’m not sure anyone does.

What I do know is that we want our patients to get better. That’s why we chose this job. I’ve stood in a consult room and watched a dog cross the floor and thought, yes, definitely better.

Who knows how many times I was actually right.

Is it not interesting how we can trick our minds like this?

The publication: Conzemius & Evans, JAVMA 2012.

09/08/2026

Brisk patellar reflex. So where’s the lesion?

Not the reflex arc — that’s intact. A brisk reflex means the brakes are off: somewhere higher up, the descending signal that normally *calms* it has been cut, so the knee-jerk runs wild. Classic upper motor neuron.

What “brisk” looks like: a big, fast kick to a gentle tap — sometimes a few extra bounces before it settles. Normal is one tidy kick. Absent is a sad little flicker, or nothing. (Make sure you’re hitting the right spot with the limb relaxed — poor positioning is how you get a false negative on a reflex that’s actually there.)

What it earns you: the lesion is cranial to L4. That’s it — but that’s a lot of spine. The rest of the exam narrows it. Normal thoracic limbs → T3–L3. Tetraparesis, neck pain, deficits in all four → look cervical.

This dog: normal forelimbs → T3–L3 cord lesion.

Same tap, opposite story: brisk points *up* (cranial to L4); absent points *into* the reflex arc itself (L4–L6, femoral nerve).

Here’s why I test it in nearly every lameness workup — not because it’s usually abnormal (it almost never is), but because I know exactly what *normal* feels like under my hand. So on the rare day it’s not normal, I catch it instantly — and an abnormal patellar reflex hands me a huge amount of information for very little effort.

Read the whole dog! 🩮 And save this for your next exam. 😉

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