What are we trying to accomplish when we add something besides an antibiotic to our treatment regimen for bovine respiratory disease (BRD)? Is the anticipated outcome from this ancillary treatment positive, neutral or negative? In this episode, AABP Past President Dr. Mike Apley, discusses the current scientific literature on the addition of a variety of NSAID’s, steroids and Vitamin C to a BRD treatment protocol. Dr. Apley provides his view that an AABP proceedings paper from experts on a subject provide the busy private practitioner with the literature search and article interpretation that they may not have the time, resources or expertise to perform on their own. Dr. Apley’s draft proceedings paper from the 4th AABP Recent Graduate Conference can be found here. All AABP publications are now available open access through an online searchable database of high quality downloadable PDF documents that are indexed at the article level for keyword and author searches. Dr. Apley states that the goals for ancillary BRD therapy include improvement in the welfare of an animal, increased treatment response, or improved performance. His review of the published literature for flunixin demonstrates a reduction of fever but mixed results on other criteria for treatment response. He references an article from Christie et al. Bovine Practitioner 1977 Volume 12 demonstrates a negative impact from the use of corticosteroids for treatment of BRD. We also discuss how veterinarians can access and review Freedom of Information Act summaries submitted for drug approvals by going to this link.