Veterinary Revolution

The patient had been nauseated and suffering from diarrhea. At the clinic in Pasadena, Calif. Dr. Norman L. McBride took a blood sample, and analysis showed an abnormally high count of white cells. Dr. McBride suspected an infection of the patient's womb, put her under anesthesia and opened her abdomen. Her womb was normal, but he detected bile stains and inflammation around her gall bladder. He opened the bladder, took out a gallstone, closed the bladder, flushed it with an antibiotic solution. The patient made a good recovery and went home within a week.

In this case, as in countless others last week, the patient was a dog--a two-year-old great Dane named Missy. Dr. McBride is no M.D. but a D.V.M. (Doctor of Veterinary Medicine). Dr. McBride's clinic, where Missy's operation took place, is a tasteful, red brick colonial building staffed by four veterinarians, a practical nurse, half a dozen kennel men, plus office help. The waiting room is no different from that of any other modern, well-kept hospital. In examining and operating rooms, sterile techniques are used. The McBride clinic is part of a notable trend: in the last 20 years the medical care of pets has become virtually indistinguishable from that of their owners. It is often just as good, scientifically, and it often costs as much.

Out of the Barn. Until the 1930s, the stock figure of the veterinarian in U.S. life was the horse doctor who operated, with a heavy harness to restrain his unanesthetized victim, in any handy barn. He would handle anything from a Chihuahua to a Percheron, prescribed more worm medicine than any other treatment. Today's vets usually have a couple of years of college, a four-year V.M. course, and must pass a state licensing examination. Their number has nearly doubled (to 19,257) in 20 years. Though a great majority (perhaps 85%) still work mostly on livestock--swine, sheep, cattle, horses, etc.--the minority in city or suburban practice who concentrate on small animals and birds reap a disproportionate 50% of the vets' annual take (about $330 million).

One big reason for the improvements in veterinary medicine: nearly all developments in human medicine and surgery result from experiments with animals, so laboratory animals are helping their own kind; vets, in a sense, have most of the world's leading medical researchers working for them--they can simply apply the techniques worked out in the animal rooms attached to major hospitals.

All the Tests. Nowhere are the gains in veterinary practice more evident than in the Los Angeles area, and Dr. McBride's clinic is typical of the best. A soundproof partition insulates the waiting room from the barking and mewing in the examining and operating rooms; wards are also soundproofed, and the building is air-conditioned. The prevailing odor is of strong surgical soap. The lab runs an impressive variety of tests like those for any human patient: urinalysis ($5), complete blood count ($5), vaginal smears (three for $10). X rays are used for both diagnosis and treatment. The operating room is a scale model of any good hospital o.r., with sterilizers, surgical instruments, anesthesia gear and oxygen supply. One permanent staff member lives in a sheltered outdoor kennel. A young male greyhound, he is the resident blood bank, can give a pint every two weeks.

There are a few human ills to which the average small animal is not heir; cats and dogs do not get tooth cavities, peptic ulcers, stomach cancer, measles or smallpox. But they get nearly every other human complaint, and a few of their own. Some of the commonest for which animals are now treated: arthritis or bursitis (by injections of hydrocortisone), adenoiditis, tonsillitis and undescended testicles (all treated by surgery); respiratory infections (antibiotics). The human-animal parallel is so close that if he has a difficult case many a vet will often talk it over with an M.D.; Dr. McBride recently sought guidance from a proctologist on a case of canine hemorrhoids.

Palm Springs' Dr. Herman M. Salk (brother of Vaccinventor Jonas Salk) has pioneered with tranquilizers for dogs; they not only calm the patient, making him easier and safer to handle, but in many cases they are better than standard anesthetics. (Cows get tranquilizers to calm their jitters when coming into milk.) Dr. Salk borrows another technique from psychiatry: empathy. "A vet has to feel what the dog feels," says Salk. "When I get a patient with a tense belly, I find my belly getting tense, too."

Old Dogs, New Tricks. Heart and brain operations on pets are still uncommon, mainly because they command such high fees. But in Pasadena, Dr. Robert H. Pudenz has successfully removed several brain tumors, both malignant and benign, from dogs and cats. A Florida vet has removed worms from a dog's pulmonary artery with the animal under hypothermia. A dog has no appendix, so is spared the need for an appendectomy, but he has a human-type caecum (a dead-end pouch at a turn in the intestines), which is the favorite hideaway of the whipworm. Vermifuges often cannot reach the worms there, so most vet surgeons do a caecectomy.

Dr. Norman Sax, of Los Angeles, got a 14-year-old patient, a Pekinese named Duke, with his lungs so awash that the least exertion set him to puffing and wheezing. The diagnosis was obvious: congestive heart failure. Dr. Sax injected a diuretic to help clear the fluid from Duke's lungs, prescribed half a grain of digitalis daily for the heart. To ease Duke's last days and his owner's anguish, Dr. Sax sent an oxygen tent to the house for use in wheezing attacks, kept him dosed with cortisone. Duke wheezed through 2 1/2 more years, lived to be almost 17.

Better care of pets in their youth and prime has prolonged their lives, set vets to talking of geriatrics. Los Angeles' Dr. Raymond Sprowl has a hundred old dogs on a regular digitalis regimen. Dr. McBride regularly treats grizzled males for prostatitis (usually by castration) and performs mammectomies on females. Operations for cataract are everyday affairs; some aging, presbyopic dogs have been fitted with plastic contact lenses.

Snake Specialty. With the boom in vet medicine has come a tendency to specialization. In metropolitan centers where the trade is concentrated, some vets practice exclusively on dogs or cats or birds. Los Angeles' Dr. Norman Gale has made a name as a specialist in the complaints of snakes, turtles, tortoises, lizards and frogs. (Gale has performed Caesareans on two snakes; he could not save the mothers, but did not lose a single wriggling baby.) Burbank's Dr. J. Bradley Crundwell gets the feathered trade, mostly parrots, parakeets and canaries.

Across the country, fees are remarkably uniform. Most vets charge $3 to $5 for an office visit, add $2 or so for ordinary medicines, $3 to $6 for injections (more and better vaccines are coming out), $5 for tooth-cleaning ($7.50 with tartar scraping), $50 for cosmetic surgery to make a dog's ears stand up. Spaying runs from $20 (for a cat) to $35 for a bitch, more if the patient is over a year old. Most vets can be induced to make house calls (though they discourage them for the same reasons as M.D.s), charge $7 to $15. The little black bags they carry contain the same gadgets and remedies as those of their M.D. colleagues. In some areas, owners can get medical insurance for their pets (average rate, $15 a year). But in Kansas City last week, one plan suspended benefits: pets, like their owners, get expensive illnesses oftener when it's 'on the insurance."

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