Sunday, August 10, 2014

The Clients and Pets In Front of Us

I spent another morning in Eugene vet-teching for Pro-Bone-O. Last time, I assisted the vet. This time, I and another woman, a third-year vet student at OSU, ran the "wellness" room. We took care of dogs and cats that needed routine things like nail trims and vaccinations. Sometimes people get misdirected, or they may not have described their pet's condition completely to the guy up front who organizes everyone, and we end up having to call the vet in for a quick consult. For example, we had a cat with ear mites. We decided that it was better to have a vet make the call on the preferred treatment in case it involved a prescription of some sort. Easily diagnosed, easily treated, the vet was in and out in just a few minutes and the owner was sent home with the next set of treatments to be given in three weeks.

Then in came two dogs with brittle coats, dry, flaky skin with scattered scabs from scratching, and patchy hair loss around the butt area. Could be flea dermatitis (both had live fleas on them). Could be food allergies. Could be some sort of incipient skin infection. We definitely needed a vet to take a look. She came in, spent less than a minute examining the dog on the table, then launched into a rapid and prolonged harangue on, of all things, raw diets.

She's a holistic vet, you see--she announced this right off the bat--and she feeds her dogs raw bones and raw meat along with lightly cooked, no, better make that steamed kale and winter squash and potatoes, only uses low-fat, preferably grass-fed ground meat like bison or beef...she went on and on. The two owners were gob-smacked to say the least. The vet didn't pause for breath. She didn't even stop when the guy mumbled something about food stamps. She said, if you can't feed raw, then you have to feed grain-free, of course. Because the dogs are suffering from allergies caused by the corn in their diets. And NO hotdogs or lunchmeat. NO bread or pasta. There was more, much more, but I was getting so angry that I could only focus on not throttling the vet then and there.

My fucking god, we saw a woman and her dog today who live in a fucking tent. A fucking tent! We vaccinated a lovely cat owned by another woman--they live in her car. And this crazed vet is going on and on about fucking steamed kale to two people who are at a free clinic for the homeless and indigent, who themselves are probably nutritionally deficient and may sometimes not even eat at all if they don't have the money. They are feeding their dogs the donated food they get for free from Pro-Bone-O.

This vet may feel quite proud of herself for feeding raw. But despite the lack of evidence, real, clinical-trial-based evidence for the benefits of raw diets and positive, clinical-trial-based evidence for risks associated with them (see all the posts here to get you started; click through to all the posts and make sure you read the comments and replies; lots of confirmation bias and outright delusion out there), she is really achieving nothing more than making herself feel good. Raw diets have just about as much woo in them as homeopathy. Oh, evil dog food companies! Oh, evil pharmaceutical companies! Go live under a fucking bridge, wear organic hemp sacking instead of clothes, and grow turnips already.

On top of that, she is wrong about the allergies. It is in fact the protein source that causes the allergies most of the time, not the grain. I learned this when I spent a month shadowing with a dermatologist, a vet who specializes in matters of diet and disease. Feeding grain-free may remove irritants and some non-digestible or poorly digestible components but the absence of grain won't solve the allergy problem on its own. 

After she left, I took a deep breath, then talked to them a bit about how they could buy one bag of grain-free and mix it with the food they are getting from the free clinic, how it would help improve the dogs' diet while reducing their cost. I told them about some lower-cost, single-protein source brands of food they could get at the feed supply or the grocery store. I got them to admit that they feed the dogs table scraps (hotdogs and white bread) so I suggested they try to cut back on that. Okay as treats but they make a nutritionally deficient diet. But I said this knowing full well that when they ran out of the donated dog food, the dogs probably ate what they did. I didn't give them an imperative, I made a suggestion.

Sure, you could argue that if these two people can't feed their dogs properly, they shouldn't have dogs in the first place. But I reject that from the start. Our goal as veterinarians should be to assist our clients and their pets in ways that will be most successful for them. In other words, we must work with the actual clients and pets that are in front of us, not some fucking idealized, steamed-kale-raw-bone-eating dream. We should not shame them, confuse them, or dazzle them with bullshit. That vet made a mistake today. She was not treating the dogs and clients that were there in the room with us. 

And I learned a very valuable lesson.

1 comment:

Oldgraymare said...

I'm very proud of you...first for resisting the urge to offload on that blasted vet and secondly for showing such compassion to the folks who come to the free clinic. You're going to be a terrific vet.