Imagine your pet suffers from an insidious disease she’ll have to suffer with for the rest of her life. Next, picture a simple surgery that can fix it. No more drugs. No more side effects. No more constant testing.

Not that you general practitioner or internal medicine specialist doesn’t deserve a shot at treating your pet’s ills. And trust me, you’ll not yet want to go running off to the veterinary surgeon with Dolittler post in hand expecting miracles. Nevertheless, a couple new surgeries may render some hard-to-manage diseases eminently treatable––without the benefit of side effect-ridden drugs.

Today’s two ills in question are common. One is considered just plain annoying, and because it’s often unresponsive to medical therapy, the surgical option may provide some very welcome relief. The other falls under the category of “fundamentally difficult to treat” by anyone’s standards. The possibility of a surgical treatment, though admittedly a tricky one, may well save lives for pets who don’t respond well to drug the complex drug therapies involved.

The conditions? Spay-related, hormone-responsive urinary sphincter incontinence and the dreaded Cushing’s disease.

For dogs who suffer incontinence as a result of hormonal changes, medical management can be fraught with side effects and incomplete remission of symptoms.

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