Back Chat – making sense of lower back pain

A free online CPD evening for vets and vet nurses. Thursday 26 November 2026, 7 pm. 

About the session 

Slow to get up and reluctant to jump. Every practice sees these dogs, and working out where the pain is coming from is often the harder part. Lower back pain can have spinal, orthopaedic or neuromuscular causes, and the signs overlap enough to make telling them apart a real challenge. 

Dan Ryan, RCVS and EBVS® Specialist in Veterinary Neurology, will demystify the most common conditions, including lumbosacral disease and discospondylitis, and talk through how to approach the differentials. He will also present real cases from our lower back pain clinic, some with more unusual diagnoses, so expect a little clinical detective work along the way. 

There will be time for questions at the end, so bring along any back cases that have been nagging at you. 

About the speaker 

Dan Ryan BVM BVS BVMedSci MVetMed dipECVN AFHEA MRCVS is an RCVS and EBVS® Specialist in Veterinary Neurology and joined Granta in July 2025. 

Dan graduated from the University of Nottingham in 2019 and completed his residency at the Royal Veterinary College in 2025. His interests include acute spinal cord disease, epilepsy and clinical reasoning, and the last of these runs right through this session. 

Outside of work he enjoys walking and spending time outside, cooking, and spoiling his cocker spaniel.

Meet us at London Vet Show 

We will be at London Vet Show on Thursday 19 and Friday 20 November on stand A20, with our lower back pain clinic as our focus. If you are going, come and say hello. You can read more about the clinic here.

How to register 

The session is free and you don’t need to be a current referrer to join. The session will be recorded, so if you can’t make the evening, sign up anyway and we will send you the recording afterwards. Please use the sign-up form below to register and we will send joining details before the session.