There are some things that you know so well and have done for so long that you just take it for granted that other people know it, too. It’s a bit of reality check when you find out just how wrong you are. I’ve been seeing Pepper since she was a little puppy. She’s ten […]
Monthly Archives: November 2006
If you love animals and have an interest in veterinary medicine, you have probably read James Herriott’s books (All Creatures Great and Small, etc.). [ If you haven’t read them, you will enjoy them, so go read them. Then you can finish reading this some other time.] In many ways, my first year in practice […]
Today old Poochie came in for his annual checkup. Poochie is fourteen years old. He is certainly slowing down a little, but is generally in pretty good health for an old-timer. He usually checks out pretty well except for his teeth. Every year for the last few years, when I do his physical exam, I […]
So, what do you think? Is it a bad thing to put a muzzle on a dog? Most people would say, "it depends". It depends on whether or not you think the dog is going to bite you. It’s a little more complicated than that, though. First, you have to recognize the subliminal anti-muzzle feeling […]
In an article reviewing "Spamalot" (the musical theater version of "Monty Python and the Holy Grail"), the reviewer notes that attendance at musical theater has been largely the province of women and homosexual men. This is something of which I have been blissfully unaware. He goes on to note that "Spamalot" brings in a new […]
Fall colors in the Bootheel are brown and browner out in the countryside. The cotton is pretty much picked, so the fields of snowy-white have become fields of brown stubble now. Still, Thursday was a wonderful Indian Summer day. The sky was a fine blue with only a few cirrus clouds and contrails for contrast. […]
Last week, one of my clients asked if I would visit her class. She teaches first grade and had just finished a unit on pets. I have done this many times and am happy to do so any time. When I first began doing this, it took me a number of times before I was […]
I started to post this under "internal medicine", but it’s in the right place. Dogs (in fact, all domestic animals) very rarely have a heart attack in the sense that we understand it in human medicine. Myocardial infarction (M.I.) is the technical term for "heart attack". Myocardium means heart muscle. Infarction means that the blood […]
We talked yesterday about big, flabby, weak, stretched out of shape hearts. These hearts can’t pump blood very efficiently. The body demands that a certain amount of blood get pumped around every minute on a regular basis — that’s Cardiac Output. If the heart can’t pump strongly enough to get that done with a normal […]
We’ve all heard someone speak of someone being "big-hearted", or "having a lot of heart". Those are good things. Having a truly big heart (as in enlarged) is not a good thing. Patients who have abnormally large hearts don’t generally have a nice big, strong heart. They usually have weak, flabby, stretched out of shape […]