Your veterinarian is a crucial part of the team keeping your pet healthy, and they have extensive knowledge and expertise that should be heard and incorporated diligently if you want to do what is best for your animal. However, many people seem to imagine that vet school or a few years of practice has rendered veterinarians as experts on all things animal, and so people often accept advice given to them by a veterinarian without thinking or questioning.
Vet school covers a lot of information in 4 years, so many topics, particularly those that are peripheral to medicine, are covered very quickly and superficially. For the most part, vet school focuses on ailments that impact animals: pathogens and injuries, diagnostic tools, pathology, pharmacology, etc. and less on animals per se.
Your veterinarian MAY have expertise in other fields—may be a fabulous expert in all sorts of additional animal fields! But if so, that knowledge came from somewhere other than vet school…
Even within their field of expertise, if you ask ten vets the same question, in most instances you will get ten different answers. Sometimes the answers will be incompatible. Bodies are complicated, medicine is inexact, there are very few questions in medicine to which there this a single correct answer, particularly those that involve balancing objectives or applying judgment…
Topics about which veterinarians are often imagined to be experts but seldom are:
| Behavior | Training | Breeds |
| Nutrition | Weight | Saddle Fit |
| Ethics | Reason and Logic | Animal Sports |
| Thermodynamics | Equipment | When to euthanize |
| Optimal age to spay/neuter | Optimal age to start riding your horse | Meaning of life |
Topics upon which your veterinarian likely did receive a reasonable degree of education depend a bit on where they went to school and what they focused upon, although if they are not an expert in a particular field the education may have been limited, and unless they make a real effort to stay current their information may not be current, but in general:
| Bacteriology | Immunology | SA Critical Care |
| Cardiology | Integrated Problem Solving | SA Primary Care |
| Imaging | Intro. to Animal Care | SA Medicine |
| Oncology | LA Medicine | SA Surgery |
| Pathology | LA Surgery | Toxicology |
| SA Medicine | LA Emergency Care | Clinical Nutrition |
| SA Surgery | Microscopic Anatomy | Theriogenology |
| SA Emergency Care | Diagnostic Services | Special Animal Medicine |
| Neuroscience | Parasitology | Anesthesiology |
| General Medicine | Diagnostic Pathology | Veterinary Ethics |
| Epidemiology | Physiology | Virology |
| Pharmacology | Practice Management | Pathology |
| Gross Anatomy | Mycology | VM & Public Health |
Some may hear this as being a refutation of expertise—as suggesting that vets do not know anything, and you should listen to your cousin or some stranger on the internet. ABSOLUTELY NOT! I am close friends with many veterinarians, and almost without exception they are intelligent, informed, educated, rational people who know a GREAT deal about their field of expertise, and I am incredibly grateful to have their help in keeping my animals healthy!
You are the captain of the team caring for your animal, and you need to make the ultimate decisions, and in order to do so effectively, you need to gather the right input from various sources, weigh it appropriately, and then integrate that information into the best possible decision. There are few better sources of information about the health of your animal than a good veterinarian; just be mindful that the questions you are asking them are the right ones and that you are listening to their answers carefully, critically, and in balanced concert with other expert advice…
