A social media war is raging in the veterinary world

An unnecessary war is raging between non-believing and believing members of the veterinary profession. No, I am not talking about religion, but the beliefs I’m talking about are held as passionately as if this was a fundamentalist versus atheist war. The topic is homoeopathy, and the latest battle in the war has been prompted by an infographic written by a vet that’s being widely shared on social media, provocatively titled “Homoeopathy Does No Harm: Really?”. This lists a number of anecdotal incidents where animals have allegedly died when homoeopathy was used in the place of conventional veterinary medicine.

Licensed veterinary medicines are, generally, fairly safe. Before receiving a license and being marketed, they must be very thoroughly assessed for effectiveness and safety by the Veterinary Medicines Directorate in the UK, or their equivalent organisations elsewhere in the EU. While it is true that adverse reactions and side effects may occur, if used appropriately the balance of risk to benefit is very much in the patient’s favour. This, though, is something I’m hoping to come back to in a future blog… For today, I want to look at the other side of the coin - the potential risk to both animal and human health from accidental misuse of veterinary products.

Have you heard of the “One Health” movement? If not, you will be soon! As we learn more and more, we’re realising just how connected human health, animal health, and environmental health are. As a result, in recent years vets, doctors and environmental scientists have started working more and more closely… to study the problem and hopefully find some solutions.

While anyone who was completely surprised by the freezing weather and snowstorms of the last couple of days obviously wasn’t paying attention (!), I think it’s fair to say that a lot of us were startled at how bad it actually got. Down here on Dartmoor, we haven’t seen weather like this for a decade or more. So, I thought it was a good idea to put up a quick blog on caring for animals in the snow.

This is a rather strange one (and I have to say I think it’s rather unfortunate it falls over Valentine’s Day!), but neutering is a major issue in animal health. There are three reasons for this - it’s widely carried out, there are population-level health benefits, but there are both advantages and disadvantages to neutering on the individual pet level.