In human medicine there is a term called “shared decision making.” It means that the patient is provided with the best available evidence about a medical situation and is encouraged to weigh in on the diagnostic and treatment options instead of leaving all the decisions to be made by the physician.
We believe the same should be true for animal medicine. Your knowledge about your pet qualifies you to collaborate in the process of how best to diagnose a health problem based on your dog’s symptoms, in addition to choosing from among treatment options once the cause of the problem has been identified.
It doesn’t mean you have the knowledge of a vet, but you do bring things to the table that a vet does not. A case in point:
We knew of a man who took his dog to the vet because there was swelling in his groin. The doctor put the dog on antibiotics, and that cleared up the swelling around the edges, but the vet said he still had a mass that didn’t look right and could be cancer. She took a needle aspirate and examined the contents under a microscope. There were no cancer cells. She then took a photo of the dog from underneath and sent it to a veterinary internist at a nearby hospital, who advised that the animal come in for some diagnostics that involved sedation so that she could get deeper into the tissue and see what was going on.
Before going that route, the man decided to take his dog to a veterinary surgeon who spent much of his time removing canine masses, lumps, and bumps that weren’t part of normal canine anatomy. That doctor could find absolutely nothing wrong — no mass, no swelling, no tissue that wasn’t supposed to be there. Why the initial veterinarian thought there was a problem it’s hard to say — maybe there was still some swelling left from the infection. But the man’s hunch that his dog was healthy was right.
Sometimes it goes in the opposite direction. Someone who lives with a dog is the first to detect that all is not as it should be and can clue the veterinarian in so he can do a workup based on symptoms. Either way, it’s a dog “parent’s” duty to weigh in because he or she has made observations that can inform both diagnostics and treatment.
