Getting Experience 5

This past week I drove down to Eugene to spend a day with an internal medicine veterinarian at a specialist referral clinic. She finished up with her clients and procedures early so I also got to observe a gall bladder removal surgery performed by a surgical specialist (more on that in a later post).

There is an odd, diffuse tension between specialists and general vets, which we can call GPs (for general practitioners). There are certainly differences in how these two groups of vets operate. I've been asking questions of both groups to try to understand this.

I've heard specialists dismiss what GPs do as not much more than giving vaccinations, treating fleas, and doing spays/neuters. Of course, those things do indeed form the bulk of the activities I've seen at the clinic that I have been shadowing at...because those things constitute the most basic forms of companion animal health care. It's not the activities themselves that the specialists get sniffy about, but the daily and somewhat unvarying repetition of these activities.

I asked one of the young vets in my shadow clinic why she was a GP. She said that she had intended to become an anaesthesia specialist, but while in vet school, she married and decided that going straight into practice instead of spending several more years in internships and residencies suited her and her family life better. Not a ringing endorsement of the GP track but certainly understandable.

I asked an eye specialist what the pros and cons were of her specialty. One of the cons was obvious: a specialist needs to be located in or near an urban area in order to have sufficient density of clients to make a living. But she also said that not getting to know her patients well was a con. She only sees them for special ailments and doesn't typically see multiple animals from the same client across years the way a GP in an established clinic might. A pro for her was that she simply loved what she did.

I am probably too old to become a specialist given the minimum 4-6 years of additional training beyond vet school required for most of them. However, it is interesting to explore these aspects of veterinary practice.