hellooooo. ive heard that sometimes, if a cow is experience excessive gas, you can just... like, stab a teensy hole in the right spot and all the gas comes out. how does that even work?? isn't that.. dangerous, i guess? and if it is indeed a safe and tried method, why can't we do this on humans too??
gettingvetted here.
Yep, in some severe cases of bloat or displaced abomasum (similar to a GDV in dogs) you can trocharize the offending portion of the stomach to relieve the gas on an emergency basis - a cow’s stomach can become so large and filled with gas that it inhibits breathing. Often this is followed by tacking the stomach to the body wall to prevent displacement in the future, either straight from the trochar, or opening the abdomen surgically. In some cattle that bloat recurrently, the rumen can be tacked to the body wall and kept open, similar to how cannulated cattle are made, just without the cannula.
Not that we want to encourage supporting Dr. Pol, but there are excellent videos of both standard types of trocharization, in a beef animal here (rumen trocharization) and in a dairy cow here (abomasum tacking - trocharization was not necessary first).
Trocharization to deflate a GDV is certainly possible but is typically done with a large bore needle rather than an actual trochar. We often do this to stabilize an animal prior to surgery to perform a gastropexy (the small animal form of “tacking”).
I couldn’t tell you why this isn’t done in humans, but as far as I know it’s not typically this big of a problem?? Maybe some of our medblr followers can chime in.
