Did your job exist one thousand years ago? Disregard changes in technology (i.e. doctors existed even if they didn't practice medicine the same way as today)
Yes
No, but there was a earlier/similar version of it
No, my job isn't analogous to anything that existed 1000 years ago
The Food and Drug Administration is warning the public to not feed dogs Raaw Energy dog food because samples have shown contamination with m
The Food and Drug Administration is warning the public to not feed dogs Raaw Energy dog food because samples have shown contamination with multiple pathogens that are dangerous to both people and pets.
The FDA requested the company recall its implicated products, but the company has not done so.
The implicated dog food has tested positive for one or more of the following bacteria: Listeria monocytogenes, Salmonella, E. coli O157 and Campylobacter jejuni.
Frozen dog food is contaminated with bacteria that can kill your dog if you feed it to them. And the company refuses to recall their product.
They don't use lot numbers, only manufacture dates. If you have any of these Raaw Energy products in your freezer, with these date codes, throw it out:
So I know plenty of vets have the experience of a pet being brought in with very minor symptoms that turn out to be signs of life-ending diseases ("she's a bit more vocal and not eating as much food but otherwise acting pretty normal" -> "end stage cancer, cat is put down that same day") but that's depressing and I'm wondering if you have a favorite story where the opposite happened? as in the owner had what seemed like very valid/reasonable concerns about their animal's condition/activities/whatever (so like, not a "is this a tick!?" *points at nipple* thing) and it turned out to just be completely benign weirdness?
I can’t think of a totally horror turns into yay! One…. But…
We did have a dog, female, not neutered, come in for abdo pain, vaginal discharge and we were all like oh god here we go, it’s a pyometra. Things get worse when we do an ultrasound and it actually looks like her uterus might be cancerous / have a large mass attached to it. Double horror tbh.
Owner elects for surgery and we go in and find a huge, huge mass where one side of her ovaries/uterine horn used to be.
Okay, not great, but eventually removable. Dog is spayed, she wakes up from surgery fine… so then we start looking at this mass and it’s super heavy and super gnarly looking.
We cut into it…. And it’s a teratoma!!!! It’s full of pus, sure, but also cartilage and fat and fur/hair. There’s what I think might be the beginnings of teeth but unconfirmed.
SUPER cool, quite rare! And actually totally benign!
We send it off, confirm no cancer to be seen, dog goes home and basically just gets to recover as a normal spay. Everyone’s happy!
I have had a few genuinely scary for all involved turn out simple and weird, but one of my favorite things is when people come in absolutely panicked about their dog having trouble breathing/choking and they were reverse sneezing.
I have a saved youtube video of a beagle really honking away that I use for confirmation (is it like this?) but usually for my own personal enjoyment first I ask the client to try and explain what the dog was doing just because people can NOT make the noise entirely right but some people really do their best acting. (Also it does help me avoid leading the client if it's something different, but.) Ask 2 people to do their best impression of a reverse sneeze in front of each other and let them argue about how neither is doing it right ONLY if you have a poker face.
THIS IS YOUR FINAL WARNING TO GET YOUR MEDS BEFORE THE PHARMACIES CLOSE
they are going to be CLOSED OVER THE HOLIDAYS and so will the DOCTORS WHO SIGN YOUR PRESCRIPTIONS.
if you don't have enough meds to last the next THREE WEEKS, put in for your repeats and refills tomorrow! that's Wednesday! do it! don't go to hospital at New Year because you ran out of stuff!
This is the time of year when prospective vet students are putting in their applications for the class of 2030 for most of the US vet schools. As an alum, I have for the past few years been involved in both the initial (file review) and secondary (interview) stages of application review for my school. I've seen some great and some terrible applications.
In order to prevent people from gaming the system, there's limits to how much you're allowed to share as a reviewer, but I don't think any of this pulls back the curtain too much. Here's a few tips for anyone out there who's working on this, based on what I see on the back end:
Fill out all the annoying redundancies. To protect privacy and best maintain impartiality, people are likely going to see some parts of your application and not others. I have a rubric I am trained to use and there's nothing quite like reading a letter of recommendation about how good someone was as an assistant at a clinic that there's no data for. I know it's fiddly and obnoxious but my side is too, and if I have to spend 10 minutes digging through each file to find an oblique reference to something to bolster your score I may not see what you want me to see.
Follow the essay prompt. Last year, the prompt was about a specific experience when you knew you wanted to be a vet. It literally was included in the prompt that they aren't looking for an "oh, always, ever since I was little" answer. Yet I had 4 out of my 25 reviewed applicants who did exactly that. (Trust me, I also wanted to be a vet since I was tiny - but you have to answer the question asked. Pick an experience that confirmed that this is the right profession for you.)
Spell check. Ask a friend or parent or stranger in the tutoring hall to look your personal statement over. If you're quoting someone, check that you've spelled their name properly and are attributing the right words.
Ask your references if they can write a positive letter of recommendation for you. You don't need to read the letters or anything, but don't just put people in the system and assume they'll write a good letter. I have had 2 people over the years with letters that state outright that the writer does not recommend we accept the person. That is pretty devastating for an application, and neither of those applicants proceeded to the second round.
Understand what schools are looking for. An ideal veterinary applicant has both breadth and depth of experience. They have a realistic (hopefully experience-based) understanding of what's involved in the veterinary world and can articulate why they want to be here and what they want to do. They have leadership skills and are multidimensional people who exist outside of veterinary medicine. And they care about building a community and working with others, a vital part of being on any team. Some of these are things that you have or have not done, but a lot of them are things that you have to tell me about both what being somewhere entailed and what that tells me about you. To that end...
Be explicit and specific. So you worked at a vet clinic for the summer, that's great! What did you do? Were you shadowing, taking histories, monitoring surgery? So you were the captain of the team, that's great! What did you do? What kind of leadership did that involve? For bonus points: So you and your team play the bassoon to penguin amputees for 2 hours once a month, that's great! What does that mean about you? Does music represent an outlet for your stress, is there a transferable skill set (always), why this activity? People often list something that *I know* involved leadership (like RA, TA, etc), but I can't just go on the vibes because that's intrinsic bias talking. And maybe you were a bad leader, so I don't know if you don't tell me otherwise.
I can't speak for veterinary school, but vet techs learn anatomy, diseases, anesthesiology, surgical assisting, pharmacology, emergency medicine, husbandry, radiology, diagnostic testing, parasitology, nutrition, preventative medicine, and behavior for cats and dogs. Then we do it all again for large animals and exotics.
Nearly all of us experience compassion fatigue at least once.
Please be kind to veterinary staff. We're not in it for the money. We love your animals and want the best for them.
This is the time of year when prospective vet students are putting in their applications for the class of 2030 for most of the US vet schools. As an alum, I have for the past few years been involved in both the initial (file review) and secondary (interview) stages of application review for my school. I've seen some great and some terrible applications.
In order to prevent people from gaming the system, there's limits to how much you're allowed to share as a reviewer, but I don't think any of this pulls back the curtain too much. Here's a few tips for anyone out there who's working on this, based on what I see on the back end:
Fill out all the annoying redundancies. To protect privacy and best maintain impartiality, people are likely going to see some parts of your application and not others. I have a rubric I am trained to use and there's nothing quite like reading a letter of recommendation about how good someone was as an assistant at a clinic that there's no data for. I know it's fiddly and obnoxious but my side is too, and if I have to spend 10 minutes digging through each file to find an oblique reference to something to bolster your score I may not see what you want me to see.
Follow the essay prompt. Last year, the prompt was about a specific experience when you knew you wanted to be a vet. It literally was included in the prompt that they aren't looking for an "oh, always, ever since I was little" answer. Yet I had 4 out of my 25 reviewed applicants who did exactly that. (Trust me, I also wanted to be a vet since I was tiny - but you have to answer the question asked. Pick an experience that confirmed that this is the right profession for you.)
Spell check. Ask a friend or parent or stranger in the tutoring hall to look your personal statement over. If you're quoting someone, check that you've spelled their name properly and are attributing the right words.
Ask your references if they can write a positive letter of recommendation for you. You don't need to read the letters or anything, but don't just put people in the system and assume they'll write a good letter. I have had 2 people over the years with letters that state outright that the writer does not recommend we accept the person. That is pretty devastating for an application, and neither of those applicants proceeded to the second round.
Understand what schools are looking for. An ideal veterinary applicant has both breadth and depth of experience. They have a realistic (hopefully experience-based) understanding of what's involved in the veterinary world and can articulate why they want to be here and what they want to do. They have leadership skills and are multidimensional people who exist outside of veterinary medicine. And they care about building a community and working with others, a vital part of being on any team. Some of these are things that you have or have not done, but a lot of them are things that you have to tell me about both what being somewhere entailed and what that tells me about you. To that end...
Be explicit and specific. So you worked at a vet clinic for the summer, that's great! What did you do? Were you shadowing, taking histories, monitoring surgery? So you were the captain of the team, that's great! What did you do? What kind of leadership did that involve? For bonus points: So you and your team play the bassoon to penguin amputees for 2 hours once a month, that's great! What does that mean about you? Does music represent an outlet for your stress, is there a transferable skill set (always), why this activity? People often list something that *I know* involved leadership (like RA, TA, etc), but I can't just go on the vibes because that's intrinsic bias talking. And maybe you were a bad leader, so I don't know if you don't tell me otherwise.
Fleas never really stop being an issue in vet med, but as we in the northern hemisphere are rapidly entering summer, it is once more kicking up in intensity.
In a perfect world, everyone should have their pets on prevention year-round and we'd never have to deal with them, but that's not an achievable outcome.
If your pet does have fleas, you need to treat all pets in the household with effective prevention for at least 3 months while managing the environment. Let me break that down a little further:
"all pets in the household" means every non-human mammal in the house. I don't care if you're only seeing fleas on your one dog - other dogs, cats, ferrets, bunnies, guinea pigs, etc all need to be treated too. All of them.
"effective prevention" unfortunately at least in the US probably means prescription medication, which means your pets have to have a current (generally within last 12 mo) exam on file with a veterinarian. Frontline and other fipronil- or pyrethrin/oid-based products available OTC have become largely ineffective in the last decade or so. I know it's more expensive to get prescription prevention. But I promise it's more expensive in the long run to spend money on products that don't work well and then still have to buy the good stuff afterwards.
"at least 3 months" is because of the flea life cycle and how prevention works. The stuff you give your pets kills the adult fleas when they bite, so they disappear and stop making more fleas. Flea eggs will continue to hatch for a couple months after that. If you treat for less than 3 months you will have the same fleas again. If you stop treating after 3 months you can get fleas again (just like you got them in the first place) but are not guaranteed to.
"managing the environment" means doing what you can to minimize the number of flea eggs that are around. This helps keep your pets comfortable (less itchy) and healthy (reduced risk of illness from fleas). Mostly I have people focus on good household hygiene like vacuuming and washing bedding frequently. If you do use a flea "bomb" product, read the packaging carefully first - most of these are toxic to pets and so have to keep pets out during and for a period of time following treatment.
I feel like to really get this circulating as it should, we need it superimposed over the picture of the turkey going in the fridge. (I can't do it I'm on my phone.)
Hi, you mentioned in a recent post that fleas are becoming resistant to Frontline. We've started to use it recently to prevent ticks (more of a concern Haven't had a problem with either yet but I was wondering if you knew anything about whether ticks were also getting resistant?
Thank you for sharing the flea information!!
I have not heard anything about issues with tick prevention with those products - and a brief review of the available literature as well as some of my veterinary Facebook groups does not show any real indications of a problem. I would guess that because of the nature of the tick life cycle, which is most often not completely within domestic pet species as the hosts, there is a lower selective pressure on ticks than fleas.
Fleas never really stop being an issue in vet med, but as we in the northern hemisphere are rapidly entering summer, it is once more kicking up in intensity.
In a perfect world, everyone should have their pets on prevention year-round and we'd never have to deal with them, but that's not an achievable outcome.
If your pet does have fleas, you need to treat all pets in the household with effective prevention for at least 3 months while managing the environment. Let me break that down a little further:
"all pets in the household" means every non-human mammal in the house. I don't care if you're only seeing fleas on your one dog - other dogs, cats, ferrets, bunnies, guinea pigs, etc all need to be treated too. All of them.
"effective prevention" unfortunately at least in the US probably means prescription medication, which means your pets have to have a current (generally within last 12 mo) exam on file with a veterinarian. Frontline and other fipronil- or pyrethrin/oid-based products available OTC have become largely ineffective in the last decade or so. I know it's more expensive to get prescription prevention. But I promise it's more expensive in the long run to spend money on products that don't work well and then still have to buy the good stuff afterwards.
"at least 3 months" is because of the flea life cycle and how prevention works. The stuff you give your pets kills the adult fleas when they bite, so they disappear and stop making more fleas. Flea eggs will continue to hatch for a couple months after that. If you treat for less than 3 months you will have the same fleas again. If you stop treating after 3 months you can get fleas again (just like you got them in the first place) but are not guaranteed to.
"managing the environment" means doing what you can to minimize the number of flea eggs that are around. This helps keep your pets comfortable (less itchy) and healthy (reduced risk of illness from fleas). Mostly I have people focus on good household hygiene like vacuuming and washing bedding frequently. If you do use a flea "bomb" product, read the packaging carefully first - most of these are toxic to pets and so have to keep pets out during and for a period of time following treatment.
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