#veterinrian

[drferox]

Do you own cats? Have 5 minutes to complete a research survey gathering data to hopefully improve the welfare and health or cats with FIV? Do it. Share it. More data is good data.

[xchoco-mixturex]

Silly dialogue based on the way of the house husband: veterinrian edition Sunni suddenly made me imagine.

Kuon: You are suppossed to be a veterinarian!! You know! Animals and stuff! You should look more friendly and cute, dont you get it?!

Sniper,on his head: Am I intimidating...?

[drferox]

If you haven’t already, I would love to hear about the cat you treated that kept attacking its own tail?

That cat was certainly an oddball, and I don’t know what went wrong in hi head or with his nerves or both, but he hated his own tail.

He was an indoor cat, so when he presented for a cat bite abscess on his tail it was a bit suspicious, but he did live with another feline friend so it wasn’t impossible, even though the owner had never seen them fight.

So we treated the abscess. And that was fine.

But then he got another abscess on his tail.

This was a bit suspicious, so he was admitted to treat it surgically. He was placed in a hospital cage while he was waiting his turn.

There is something unique about the sounds of a cat fight, and when that cacophony of noise erupted from the kennel room, we all rushed in to see how the hell two cats had got access to each other.

Instead, we found this cat, on his own, backed into a corner of the cage throwing an evil look at his own tail, which was twitching in irritation as cats’ tails tend to do.

We watched as he growled, hissed, spat and then launched at his own tail, and screamed after he’d bitten himself again.

The cat was giving himself cat bite abscesses from repeatedly attacking his own tail.

In the end, we couldn’t curb this behavior even with medication, it was like he didn’t recognise the tail as his own, and he ended up having it amputated for welfare reasons. With only a stump of a tail remaining (too short to flick in his peripheral vision), he went on to live a normal life.

I don’t know if the cat had altered neurological sensation in his tail, or some sort of Body Integrity Identity Disorder, but he is one of the most unusual cases I’d ever seen.

[drferox]

Hello! I'm graduating at the end of this year (eek!) and I'm currently looking at jobs. I've read that you were quite far away from family and friends with your first job, and I wanted to know how you handled it? Because I'm considering the same thing but I also don't want to isolate myself :( also if you have any other advice for picking jobs I would really appreciate it! (Ps your recent post about horses was amaze I was laughing so much I couldn't breathe 😂)

To be completely honest, moving away from family wasn’t that big of an issue, as we didn’t really get along all that well and I was keen to get out of my parents’ control, so moving interstate for a respectable job was a convenient way to do that.

Being isolated from my friendship groups and classmates was more challenging, especially as I’d been living on campus for two years and was basically surrounded by my classmates at least 5 days a week, breakfast through to dinner. But I was super lucky and one of my classmates, who I was close to, ended up employed at the same practice with me. It was great for us, even though we we both interstate from our main support groups, we could lean on each other and spent he first month or so going with each other on large animal calls.

You underestimate just how important being able to have pizza and movie nights with your friends are until they become difficult to have. I am really glad to have had him there, because nobody understands what a new graduate veterinarian goes through, except another new graduate veterinarian. Even myself, several years removed from that situation, would probably not empathize exactly how I would have back then.

If you’re not as lucky as I was, then making sure you put aside time to catch up and debrief with your classmates is hugely beneficial to your mental health. You want to be able to spend some time not talking about work, of course, but you often need to get a whole bunch of clinical stuff off your chest, especially when you’re learning and worried you might have made a mistake.

Put time and effort aside to maintain contact with your classmates and support groups. Individual resilience is great, but it’s not enough on its own when you wear out, and it will happen. You need other people around you, somehow, to get yourself through.

Whether that’s regular catch-ups, or online chat rooms or video calls or whatever works for you, put effort into maintaining those links.

I should have put more effort into staying in contact with my non-vet friends, but I am lucky in that most of the friends I have kept this long are the sorts of friends you can see for the first time in a long time and still feel like it’s only been a few days.

(This post might be relevant to your interests too.)

[drferox]

What do you think of ~~natural~~ homeopathic medicine? I get that it can be great complementary treatment, but you really can't argue with science. I once had a friend try to cure her dog's UTI with cranberry juice and essential oils - no antibiotics. It didn't work, and he ended up needing emergency treatment.

Homeopathy is a system of “medical” practice that treats a disease especially by the administration of minute doses of a remedy that would in larger amounts produce in healthy persons symptoms similar to those of the disease.

Homeopathic remedies are diluted so much that it is unlikely even a single molecule of the thing being ‘diluted’ remains in the administered water. It’s water and wishful thinking. It’s a placebo at best, it’s not medicine and it’s not science.

Using cranberry juice and essential oils might fall under naturopathy, or generic home remedies, but they’re only useful in very specific situations. It’s not always appropriate to use a ‘natural remedy’ intended for humans in an animal patient, because the pathophysiology might not be the same.

Essential Oil use in animals makes me very angry. There is no benefit to using them - any benefits listed are vague, non-specific, or outright wrong.

Do NOT apply essential oils to your pets. I don’t care if a certain ‘natural’ magazine published something saying you could put lavender oil on burns, do NOT do it. It does nothing to help, actively harms, and delays proper treatment.

Using essential oils on species with an excellent sense of smell borders on cruelty. That stuff is hard for us to get off, and I’ve seen half a dozen pets that have become so distressed that they’ve presented to the emergency clinic after hours because some well-meaning individual believed an article that basically claimed essential oils would work like magic and fix their pet’s problem.

Do not use essential oils on pets.

There are a handful of complementary treatments that do actually have some use, especially with chronic pain conditions. Without listing every single one that might have some benefit, the most common one I use is glucosamine and chondroitin. Used together these supplements can reduce symptoms of arthritic pain by up to 40% after 6 weeks. That’s not great on its own, but still useful as anything that reduced chronic pain is a good thing.

As a confession, I’ve done courses on ‘Healing with Herbs’. I wanted to believe in this stuff, but the science for most of it is weak, mostly human based, and so much of it is wishful thinking. I use it when and only when there is evidence to do so, and only use products that I have a high degree of trust will actually only contain what it says on the box.

A few clues that the ‘natural’ cure/treatment isn’t all it’s cracked up to be:

If a source is telling you that vets and animal health professionals either don’t know what they’re talking about, or are lying to you.

If it claims multiple, very different benefits that are difficult or impossible to quantify or measure

If there are untrackable, unverifiable testimonials saying how great the product is

If it promised rapid results

If it sounds too good to be true, it probably is

[xchoco-mixturex]

Silly dialogue based on the way of the house husband: veterinrian edition Sunni suddenly made me imagine.

Kuon: You are suppossed to be a veterinarian!! You know! Animals and stuff! You should look more friendly and cute, dont you get it?!

Sniper,on his head: Am I intimidating...?

[drferox]

Anonymous said: 🐽 Hi Dr. F! I had a question about minor injuries on pets - the kind of thing a human would stick a plaster/band-aid on and ignore. Obviously a dog or cat doesn't understand the necessity of an antiseptic ointment or a plaster/band-aid, so what can we as pet owners do to make sure any scratches or grazes heal well without wasting a vet's time on something very minor?

Dogs and cats get into minor scrapes all the time, but remember you’re not ‘bothering’ your vet or wasting their time so long as you listen to the advice you’re given. This is especially the case with cats which roam outdoors, what looks like a scratch to you may actually be a puncture wound from a cat bite and require antibiotics, otherwise it will turn into an abscess.

You have to remember that anything you put onto your pets, whether it’s a dog, cat, rabbit or anything else, will possibly get eaten. Bandages for human skin don’t really stick well to furry skin and they’re certainly not digestible.

If it’s minor you don’t strictly have to put a bandage of any kind over it, but you do want to prevent licking. Dogs and cats do not have clean mouths, despite some myths that seem popular.

You also don’t need any super-special antiseptic or topical antibiotics for a minor wound like a graze, in fact it may be better if you don’t, especially for sensitive creatures like rabbits. Don’t ever use Dettol on an open wound, or a healing wound. It’s not suitable for living flesh, and it hurts.

Instead, it’s wiser to use either:

Plain, clean water

Salty water

Diluted iodine (betadine)

Diluted chorhexidine (but not around eyes)

All of these things are fairly safe if the animal ends up consuming them too.

Thin skinned pets, like greyhounds, may need pressure applied for a little while if they’re bleeding, but if in doubt contact a vet anyway.

Another particular caveat is for white cats. Squamous Cell Carninoma (SCC) are a particularly nasty skin cancer induced by UV light, and they are insidious in that they can begin by looking like little more than a scratch, scab or ulcer. A normal minor wound should heal within two weeks at the most. A SCC will not, and will progress slowly, so must have vet attention. You really don’t want those to be left unchecked.

[drferox]

What happens if a virus gets in the pet's brain?

Depends entirely on the virus, but potentially not a whole lot.

Viruses are typically very cell specific. They’re only little bags of genetic material with a few relatively simple instructions to produce more of themselves. They are highly dependent on the cellular machinery of the host cell. Consequently, some only infect gut cells, or one particular type of gut cell (eg enterocyte), some affect respiratory cells, or liver cells. Some affect blood vessel cells and they’re particularly scary because they’re everywhere in the body.

Neurons are pretty specialized cells in any brain. A virus that’s adapted to other cell types but got ‘lost’ in neural tissue might not actually do very much, or perhaps a minor local reaction. In which case, how did it get into the brain in the first place?

Some viruses do infect neurons, and if they reach the brain they cause a whole lot of problems. Your brain controls consciousness and thought, but it also has a bunch of other functions including temperature regulation, and small endocrine organs that tell all the other endocrine organs what to do. You stuff up the brain, you can stuff up everything. Check out viral encephalitis with herpesviruses, rabies and the arboviruses for more information.

The difficulty with a pet’s brain is that to access information about it you either need brain scans or CSF samples, which are expensive or not available everywhere, so in practice there’s a fair amount of guess work.

If you’re making a fictional virus, remember to consider how it gets into the brain, and what specific functions of the brain it alters or knocks out to determine a set of symptoms.