View from the Vet Side
We Need Encouragement Too
By Margot Vahrenwald, DVM, ASVJ
Have you ever seen one of those internet memes that give the perception and the funny-serious reality of a particular job or career? Being a veterinarian is one career that lends itself to the interpretation of perceived reality versus true reality, with funny results.
It truly is a wonderful career, but it also has increasing negatives in the face of unrealistic public perceptions too. I do get to work with great pets and their owners every day, but the situations and owner actions and reactions can be highly variable. Most are positive, but a chunk are negative, with owner complaints about costs or other parts of care or sometimes out of high emotion anxiety, making us the target of angry, emotional outbursts. No one told us to study psychology and counseling at part of our career path.
The pressure of that perception – what we do, what we can do and how the cost must be covered – along with the personality types that choose veterinary medicine and the pressure of the work itself, creates a huge risk of burnout and even suicide.
Veterinarians now rank highest among the medical professions at risk of committing suicide. The unexpected suicide in 2014 of Dr. Sophia Yin really brought this forward to the profession. She was a young, exceptional veterinarian who was strongest advocate for pushing stress-free, fear-free handling and care for our veterinary patients. But her self-imposed expectations and self-doubts coupled with the pressures of being a veterinarian, an entrepreneur and more culminated in leading her to make the sad choice to end her life.
Personally I know many veterinarians who struggle with depression and self-worth as the majority of us becoming veterinary doctors are type A-perfectionists who live to serve the pets we take care of with all our hearts and to the best of our abilities as well as being varying degrees of nerdy medical scientists.
At the time I went to veterinary school, there was no instruction on the business of being a veterinarian and very little on how to take care of your mental health. We were well prepared and trained on the medical side, but no one taught us about the rest that comes with the title.
As Dr. Patty Khuly recently wrote for USA Today, “Vets have high stress jobs due to early competition for admission, compassion fatigue, long work hours, oversized client expectations and physician-level economic indebtedness with half an M.D.’s earning potential.”
What that means is that we fought for our entrance in to veterinary college, took on huge amounts of debt for our specialty education, and will never make as much in salary as even a human pediatrician or general family practitioner. We will spend work hours seeing patients and our after work hours trying to make follow-up phone calls, researching options for particular patients, and trying to keep up with ever-changing research and drugs. Meanwhile, we juggle family, mortgages and all the other pressures of daily life.
Sound a little stressful? Add to that daily complaints and weekly internet accusations of being gougers just trying to take an owner’s money for unneeded tests or treatments. You can see where our self-esteem and confidence take a beating – along with “experts” like Dr. Google, the floor clerk at the pet food store and breeders offering medical and nutritional recommendations. All those result in a diplomatic dance in the exam room, explaining that the person behind the website may have the best of intentions, but is not medically trained, and their recommendations need to be taken with a grain of salt.
In all fields there can be the bad actors, but the majority of veterinarians are working in small businesses that must cover the overhead of ever increasing costs for location, taxes, staff, mandatory continuing education, licenses, insurances, drug and supply costs, higher cost replacements for medications and products that get pulled off market and so much more. And, quite simply, if we don’t charge appropriately for our expertise as well as our practice expenses to make some profit, then our doors won’t be open to take care of the patients and clients that got us into this field.
So the next time you see or speak with your veterinarian, know that they are thankful to be taking care of you and your pets and maybe give a little encouragement.
Dr. Margot can be reached at parkhillvet.com