Treatment options and drug doses, each with its journal citation

Where the citations come from

Vetinuity draws its clinical suggestions from a corpus of more than 10,000 peer-reviewed veterinary journal articles, and every recommendation it makes carries a citation to one of them. There is no unsourced line in the list and no suggestion that asks you to take it on faith.

When a treatment option appears, the article behind it appears with it: authors, journal and year, on demand. The point is not to bury you in references. It is to make sure that every line on the screen can be traced back to published veterinary literature in a few seconds, by you, while the owner is still in the chair.

You also do not have to ask for any of it. The suggestions come from the exam itself, from what the client describes and what you dictate, so treatment considerations appear without a prompt, a search box or a detour between patients.

Reading a citation takes less time than it sounds. The reference names the journal and the year, which already tells you a lot: a recent consensus statement carries different weight from a small case series published decades ago. When the suggestion and the source agree with your own read of the patient, you move on. When they do not, you have a specific paper to open rather than a vague sense that something is off.

Over a few weeks this becomes a habit that keeps your prescribing current without a separate reading list, because the literature arrives attached to the cases already on your schedule.

Example

Example: an older dog with osteoarthritis pain

A 12-year-old Labrador retriever comes in because he is slow to rise after naps and has started refusing the stairs. On exam you dictate reduced range of motion and crepitus in both elbows, mild muscle loss over the hindquarters and a body condition score of 7 of 9. The treatment considerations read like this:

• Carprofen 2.2 mg/kg by mouth twice daily (Vasseur et al., Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, 1995).
• Bedinvetmab 0.5 to 1.0 mg/kg subcutaneously once a month (Corral et al., Veterinary Anaesthesia and Analgesia, 2021).
• Amantadine 3 to 5 mg/kg by mouth once daily, alongside an NSAID for pain that persists on the NSAID alone (Lascelles et al., Journal of Veterinary Internal Medicine, 2008).
• Weight reduction toward an ideal body condition (Gruen et al., Journal of the American Animal Hospital Association, 2022).

Each item shows the dose as the article reports it, with the reference beneath it. Whether any of them suits this dog, his bloodwork and the household he goes home to is your decision. The owner's ability to give medication twice a day, the recheck bloodwork you plan and the dog's weight goal will shape which option comes first.

Literature doses and your patient's math

A dose in a journal article is a published starting point, not a calculation for the animal on your table. Vetinuity keeps those two things apart. The treatment suggestions cite doses from the literature; the arithmetic for a specific patient lives in its own tools.

For that arithmetic there are the drug and CRI calculators (beta), which turn the dose you choose into volume, dilution and rate, and the veterinary formulary with weight-adjusted dosing. Free versions of several calculators are open to anyone at vetinuity.ai/calculators.

Keeping citation and calculation separate means you always know which number came from a paper and which came from the weight on today's scale.

Explains and cites, never prescribes

Vetinuity explains and cites. It does not prescribe. A treatment consideration is a suggestion with its evidence attached, and the prescribing decision belongs to the veterinarian who examined the animal.

That line is the reason the citations exist. A suggestion you can read the source for is one you can accept, adjust or reject with a reason you can write in the record. A suggestion without a source would be asking for trust it has not earned.

Options, not a single answer

The output is a set of treatment options rather than one answer. Some cases call for the first-line choice; others need the second because of a comorbidity, a drug interaction, a cost conversation or a cat that will not take a pill. Seeing the options side by side, each with its reference, makes that conversation with the owner faster and more honest.

And when an owner asks why one drug and not another, you can show them the evidence for both, which tends to end the debate sooner than any amount of explaining.

The same goes for a colleague reviewing the case later. A record that shows which options were considered, and on what evidence, is easier to pick up the next morning than one that only lists the drug that was chosen.