I was wondering if you wouldnt mind explaining why you are considering becoming a vet after becoming a doctor. QUOTE]
Well, I'm not sure about it (making the switch), but I thought I would explore the possibilities. I enjoy human medicine, but in my field I do no deal with patients. I make sure to say that I don't deal with 'patients' vs. I don't deal with 'people'- we deal with tons of people of all types all the time. But our patient contact is limited. Of course, I could change fields, say to pediatrics or something. That is always a possibility, but I really feel that I would like to have contact with animals.
I feel like pathology is a field that really crosses species boundaries in many ways. When we go through all it takes to learn human pathology, we could (in my opinion) easily learn what we need to learn to extrapolate this in dealing with other species. This is a more global approach--helping living things as opposed to just people with tumors. I was working on a dermatology rotation in med school and a woman who worked in the office brought in a photo of a skin lesion that her dog had. The dermatologist biopsied the lesion (after office hours at the dog's home) and we examined it and were able to treat it. The woman explained that the vet did not have the resources to biopsy and evaluate the pathology of the lesions. I'm sure some vets have these resources and some do not.
I have also considered learning more about veterinary pathology and doing that along with human pathology as part of my career. It just seems like a waste to learn so much about physiology and then limit it to just people. Another example is in my evaluation of brains with Creutzfeld-Jakob disease. Couldn't learning about bovine spongiform encephalopathy just add to and help develop our knowledge and our ability to diagnose and treat? Yet we are often limited to just learning about human diseases, and a bit about animal diseases only when they affect humans.
