As a veterinarian we have to confront many challenges. In this essay I will write about three different challenges: education, technology and social matter.
I think that one of the principal challenges that we have to deal with in my discipline is that we have to maintain the practice of studying our whole lives; constant education is key to being able to keep serving as a doctor. The field of medicine (human or animal) changes very quickly; there are new investigations and discoveries every day, and we have to keep up with them. But I believe this challenge makes this career more interesting and exciting. So the only solution for this is to keep studying. If you like the career, this shouldn’t be a problem.
The next challenge that I will describe in our discipline relates to technology. In veterinary science there are a lot of different areas and each one has its specific technology. Thus, we need to be a specialist in just one area, because we can’t learn about every technology. Just as in education, technology also develops very quickly. Therefore, we have to be constantly informed in order to know what is on the market or what it is the latest technology that is out there.
And finally, another challenge that we have in our discipline is the social matter. As veterinarians we don’t just interact with the patients, but also we have to interact with their owners. After all, the owners are the ones who pay us. An important fact is that to diagnose our patient we actually have to ask a third party, the owner, what is going on with our patient, has the patients been eating, sleeping, or acting normally lately? This can be a major challenges because owners sometimes lie to us or hide some symptoms that they saw, or sometimes owners just don’t believe us and they do what they think is correct even though it may be worse for the animal. I think this is just a problem of owner education. As veterinarians we have to learn how to relate to a whole spectrum of people with different levels of education and a variety of cultural backgrounds and try to convince them that we know what we are doing and try to built trust between the veterinarian and the owner.