What has become of the most honorable profession...

witnessing the corporate take over of veterinary medicine

Veterinary medicine has always been a most honorable profession. From James Herriot’s All Creatures Great and Small, it is the profession of the compassionate altruist. The Doctor who sacrifices money, a good night’s sleep, and all the bonuses of human medicine just so she can take care of our beloved pets and farm animals. What little girl did not, at one point in time, dream of being a veterinarian? That dream was usually dashed to the ground when they find out that veterinarians euthanize sick animals.

After that first culling of the pool of candidates for future veterinarians, we move on to the years of scientific education, the tough acceptance rate to veterinary school, the mismatch in cost of education and future salary, and the late nights pulling calves in freezing cold barns. Those that make it through and obtain that degree have passed through quite the initiation.

I chose veterinary medicine over human medicine, pediatrics to be exact, for one major reason, or rather two:

1. I love animals

2. Veterinary medicine was still a small business enterprise.

Most veterinary practices had between one and several veterinarians, a front office staff, and a few technicians. The veterinarian was fully responsible for case management: the procedures recommended to the client, the drugs prescribed, client education, etc. In this small practice environment, the veterinarian was like the old-time family doctor. They got to know the family, often multiple generations, through the multiple generations of pets and farm animals cared for by the family.

Growing up in the 1980s, I had witnessed, through personal experience, the switch that happened in human medicine. In the 1970s I started out seeing the family pediatrician. By the time I was a teen and my parents and I were hit by a drunk driver, the HMOs, insurance companies, and medicine-as-business had already taken over human medicine. The insurance company surgeons were refusing to operate on my mother’s fractured neck. She found a surgeon who had left the big hospital in Boston and set up an “old-fashioned” patient-centered practice in the boonies of Montana to perform the surgery on her neck that kept her upright and walking vs ending up a quadriplegic in a wheelchair.

Due to this same car accident, I discovered the world of naturopaths, chiropractors, massage therapists, and other “alternative” modalities that eventually healed my dislocated hip and secondary sciatica. Witnessing my mother go through her healing journey, and going through my own, I discovered there was a whole world of alternatives to drugs and surgery, and I eventually discovered that this world of healing existed for animals as well.

Veterinary medicine allowed me to learn about, care for, and practice medicine on the beings with whom I have a passionate love affair: dogs, cats, horses, goats, and everything in between. It also allowed me the freedom to integrate treatment modalities from surgery to acupuncture to herbal medicine and nutrition, which gives my patients the longest and best quality of life possible.

But that is all rapidly changing. I am using this space as a sounding board, to record my observations, my musings, and even some case reports and examples, on the rapidly changing face of vet med and possibly some things we, the veterinarians, and you, the animal lovers, can do to turn the tide.

Most veterinarians choose the profession because they love animals.

Veterinary medicine has become the profession with the highest suicide rate… a bloody red flag that something very serious is amiss, in a 23 billion-dollar-a-year industry.