“The young doctor should look about early for an avocation, a pastime, that will take him/her away from patients, pills, and potions…No one is really happy or safe without one.”
—William Osler M.D., The Medical Library in Post-graduate Work (1909). (viamednerds)
Take heed. Sometimes history repeats and sometimes the people who came before us know what the hell they’re talking about. Never let medicine be the only thing that you are or do.
I think one of my favourite things about interacting with human doctors is when they’re kinda impressed and horrified at the same time at fairly routine things in veterinary medicine.
Like endotracheal tubes. I fondly remember a bunch of human anaesthetists having a tour of the university veterinary hospital, and all posing for photos with an equine endotracheal tube, trying to convey just how long and wide it was.
(So if there’s a vetling out there on equine wards at the moment, feel like grabbing a photo of a horse ET tube to show medblr?)
And on the other end of the spectrum it’s like “Yeah, if you don’t have an ET tube small enough, you could consider an intravenous catheter…”
Look who I found in a dog fecal the other day: Giardiaspp!
We did the fecal because the dog had acute onset of profuse, foul-smelling, liquid diarrhea. In addition to the giardia, there’s also some motile rod-shaped and spirochete bacteria swimming around. These may or may not be contributing to the GI signs; some bacteria are normal inhabitants of the gut, others are pathogenic, and some can be both depending on strain or circumstances.
We treated with metronidazole and fenbendazole to kill the giardia, bland diet and maropitant to help with the diarrhea and GI discomfort, and probiotics to help reestablish the good GI flora that will also get killed by the antibiotic. The owner was also instructed in good hygiene and environmental disinfection practices to prevent re-infection and zoonotic transmission (the zoonotic risk is low given that different strains of Giardia typically infect dogs and people, but we don’t know if there are any immune compromised people in the household, so better safe than sorry).
The clinical signs quickly resolved, and the fecal was negative on follow-up.
((Sorry for the jumpy video; I had a hard time keeping these squiggly little dudes in focus and the phone lined up with the lenses at the same time ))
