How to Examine a Wolverine by Philipp Schott DVM

Author:Philipp Schott, DVM
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: ECW Press
Published: 2021-09-28T00:00:00+00:00

The Experimental Veterinarian

That’s right, gentle readers, I experiment on your pets. Some of you are narrowing your eyes, nodding and thinking, I knew it!, while others are already rounding up buckets of tar and bags of feathers, but hopefully the majority of you will have merely sighed, or groaned lightly, in recognition of the fact that I used a deliberately provocative but misleading title as a hook. It’s a lame writer’s trick, but I think I’m permitted one or two per book.

In fact, the title does have a legitimate origin. I was sitting around with my friend Al, riffing on titles that rhymed with The Accidental Veterinarian for my next collection of stories. Occidental, Continental, Sentimental, Incremental, Incidental, Excremental and Transcendental were all rejected before we landed on Experimental. Turning this over in my mind I realized that it was actually kind of apt. I don’t experiment in the sense of performing procedures strictly for the purposes of learning, nor do I wantonly give unproven treatments that may have harmful effects, but I do, like all veterinarians, go out on a limb and “try stuff” more often than human physicians. We experiment, gently.

Pharmaceutical companies alone spent $160 billion dollars worldwide on human health research last year. If you include government, university and other non-pharmaceutical private spending, total medical research expenditure exceeds a trillion dollars. The equivalent veterinary research budgets are a drop in this ocean of cash, and even that drop is weighted very heavily towards the health concerns of animal agriculture. So for pets, we’re talking about a droplet within a drop. It is entirely proper and right that we value human health and life more highly, so I’m not making an argument here. I’m just pointing out that our knowledge of animal diseases is patchy and thin in places. In human medicine evidenced-based medicine (EBM) is a big deal. It’s an approach that relies on consistent use of the strongest research data, rather than on instinct, experience, outdated training or weaker studies. Sometimes we can apply EBM to veterinary practice, but more often we’re looking at studies that were performed with six beagles in Kansas in 1984, or possibly no studies at all. In these cases, we often extrapolate from the human side. Fortunately humans and my patients are medically far more similar to each other than they are different, so this often works OK, but we are also often stuck just trying stuff — “gently experimenting,” if you will.

The other force that pushes us to experiment is what I will cautiously refer to as the funding model for veterinary medicine. In most wealthy countries human medical costs are paid for by governments or insurance, but while a small number of my patients do have private insurance, the great majority do not, and clients are paying out of their pockets. This means that there are often limits on which tests we can run, leaving us with a tentative diagnosis, rather than a confirmed diagnosis, far more often than in humans.

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