I just received in the mail the 14th edition of Kirk's Current Veterinary Therapy, which collates new discoveries in veterinary medicine, and am in for quite a few nights of reading to keep up to date with current techniques.
Things have changed a lot during my time as a veterinarian.
It is amazing the change a decade brings. Many veterinary procedures that were new or experimental during the mid- to late 1980s are now commonplace. Diagnoses then were primarily made by taking the animal's history and performing a physical examination. Some advanced tools were available but were seldom used because of cost and the reluctance of a less educated and less demanding clientele.
Diagnostic procedures and treatments that rival those available in hospitals for humans are now available. Animal medicine has been at the forefront of medicine in general. Many therapies were initially developed for and used experimentally on animals before making their way into the arsenal of human treatments.
I have seen the possibilities and boundaries of my profession enlarged to include many specialist fields. Even in general medicine I am encountering more and more rare cases and exotic animals, from hamsters to spiders and reptiles. My clinic has seen a growth of more than 100 per cent in exotic-pet visits in the past five years.
When I started as a vet I was still using halothane as a general anaesthetic. Ten to 20 years before that, some vets were still using ether. Nowadays we use anaesthetic protocols very similar to those in humans' hospitals, and much safer anaesthetics. An anaesthetist from a nearby hospital who is a client of mine told me, as I was giving him a tour of our surgical facilities, that vets nowadays use the same drugs he would use on an 80-year-old human patient.
Initially vets relied on nurses and ourselves to monitor anaesthetics, but now we have many technological aids, and all these advances have led to safer anaesthetics and in turn have allowed us to perform trickier surgery with less risk.