All posts by AMCteam

It takes a serious illness or injury to be admitted to the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center, and I have previously told the stories of some of these patients—from unexpected household toxins to more common, though still serious, conditions. Having world-class facilities and expert veterinary staff is only one part of providing high quality pet care; keeping the hospital environment safe for patients and staff is another. This blogpost will focus on how AMC works to maintain patients’ safety while your favorite furperson is under our care.

April 13-19, 2025 is National Dog Bite Prevention Week. This week aims to bring awareness to the fact that, although dogs are part of the family and provide companionship and immense joy, any dog can bite. National Dog Bite Prevention Week focuses on preventing dog bites to humans. Most dog bites occur in children, and most children are bitten by the family dog or dogs belonging to friends. The Schwarzman Animal Medical Center has resources for parents to help them educate and protect their children against bite injury. For National Dog Bite Prevention Week 2025, I thought I would focus my blogpost on a different type of bite injury – those sustained by dogs and cats from other dogs and cats.

The Schwarzman Animal Medical Center recently reached a major milestone in our 83,000 square-foot, $125 million “Gift of Love” hospital expansion and renovation project. We opened several new hospital wards, including our new intensive care unit (ICU), Medical-Surgical Unit (MSU) (formerly known as the Special Care Unit, or SCU), our expanded Avian and Exotic Pet Medicine Service and a new conference center. This blogpost will focus on the first two areas, ICU and MSU, and I will share more about the other exciting new spaces in a future blogpost.

Most of us in New York City live in apartments. While there are days when every New Yorker wishes for a house with a yard, the culture and convenience of city living ultimately win out. One of the downsides of apartment living is the noise from your neighbor’s apartment renovation or building repairs. This disruption can affect your pet’s daily routine, causing anxiety and distress for your favorite fur person. Take for example my former foster kitten, Luke. His building needed the leaky windows fixed. Whenever the workmen and their jackhammers were outside his apartment, he stopped using his litter box and peed on the bathroom floor. Today’s blogpost will focus on strategies to mitigate pet stress from construction noise.

A biopsy is one of the most important diagnostic tools in veterinary medicine. It’s so important that I can’t think of a veterinarian who never does a biopsy. Whether it’s a dermatologist, dentist, surgeon, internal medicine specialist or your primary care veterinarian, all use biopsies to diagnose different conditions. At the Schwarzman Animal Medical Center, veterinarians submit between five and fifteen biopsies on any given day. In many cases, a biopsy is the only way to confirm a diagnosis, especially for internal diseases like inflammatory bowel disease, liver problems and most kinds of cancer. In today’s blogpost, I’ll discuss how biopsies work and why they’re essential for diagnosis.