“CLASS is in session”! Our specialty team is now ready to help you, help your horses and cattle, and any other large animal species we can.
Welcome to the Canadian Large Animal Specialty Services!
This is a project that is growing and developing, shifting to meet the needs of our clients and veterinarians, moving to a digital platform in order to improve our reach to the communities even more!
Started with a focus on Internal Medicine, you can now also ask about horse dentistry concerns as well. We are trying to educate, support, help, and lighten the burden of difficult cases by being available, digital, and just light hearted enough to ease your stress for a moment.
Wait – back up. What is “Internal Medicine”?
Answer: Anything that doesn’t require a scalpel to be fixed, really!
As veterinarians, Internal Medicine specialists are often the Neurologist, Gastroenterologist, Cardiologist, Neonatologist, Gerontologist, Dermatologist, Urologist, Endocrinologist … you get the “-gist”!
Internal medicine focuses on the soft tissues and physiologic dysfunctions primarily, rather than mechanical issues that could get cut out or put together by a surgeon.
Here is the beauty of internal medicine: most problems in medicine are multifaceted, with pieces of different organs or hormones working together or against each other to create the issue or disease you see clinically. Internal Medicine specialists are trained to break complex problems down into components and then create a map to find the source issue(s) that we can then target! If you’ve ever watched an episode of “House” – that’s us, minus the sarcasm. Sometimes.
Internists (easier to say than “Internal Medicine Specialists”) are often your second or third opinion, your last hope, or your first line of defense. We may have even been referred to as “big brains on little legs”. (Was that a short joke?)
We have the benefit of working with amazing Primary care, Family veterinarians and dedicated clients, and get to put many brains to work on the case. We aren’t always successful, and sometimes, by the time internists get involved, there isn’t much good news. But we keep trying, doing better, building and sharing knowledge, so that one sad case can help hundreds of animals through awareness and constant improvement in our veterinary practice.
I want to reiterate that point, in case it got buried in other thoughts – the goal of the Canadian Large Animal Specialty Services is to work WITH veterinarians and owners, improving our collective knowledge and skills, and helping more animals.
How?
By building our services in 3 sections:
1) Listening
By holding consultations sessions with the veterinarians and owners, we learn about current issues, become privvy to trends, hone our skills with common and complex diseases. We are also listening to our veterinarians, their concerns, laments, and mental health. Too often, veterinarians have the weight of the world on their shoulders, and are expected to be everything, to everyone, “for a reasonable price”, and #NOMV (“Not One More Vet”) needs just as much attention as the medicine does. In addition to medicine, CLASS will look into resiliency, practice management, and any other topic to help take some weight off, and reach out to our vets to support them through their careers, and share this information in our blog posts and podcasts.
2) Learning
They call it veterinary practice and the art of veterinary medicine.
By learning about the latest research, sharing knowledge between other specialists who focus on adjunctive facets of medicine, and maintaining a growth mentality, we become better.
To learn best, is to learn together, so the Canadian Large Animal Specialty Services will put together mini article reviews and topic rounds to share the latest information with our audience.
The specialists will also need to continue improving, attending conferences, Continuing Education Events and training with other specialists. When we learn something cool, we will create an education session around that for our veterinarians to learn it too.
3) Teaching
And how better to share our knowledge than to give it away, or teach it to the veterinarians. Education session, wetlab training, on-site case consultations… CLASS will take every opportunity to answer questions, expand knowledge, and bridge knowledge gaps. If you ask, we will do our best to answer. And if we don’t know, then we go back to Step 2, learn something knew, and teach it back to you. We don’t know everything, and our specialists will guaranteed learn probably as much from our community as they learn from us, thereby growing and improving together.
One big disclaimer, if you are looking for polish and perfection, pomp and circumstance, ego and mis-placed over-confidence, you will not find it here. This group and space is for continued growth and development, because only with the help of others can be become better, ourselves.
Will we ever have more specialty services available?
Absolutely! We will grow and shift with the needs of our community. With like minded specialists, we may branch into Rehabilitation or Surgery even! Who knows. Stayed tuned, though, because one thing we do promise is constant evolution and development.
Be you a vet or an owner who has been brought to us, regardless of how you decided to join us, rest assured that CLASS is now in session and you are going to learn something today!