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Veterinarians actually receive very little training in nutrition. In my 4 years of veterinary school, I had one class, one semester long, on nutrition. Most of this course focused on which prescription diet to recommend for which disease and why. For well pets, I was taught to recommend "Pick one dry food and stick with it." A major pet food manufacturer supplied free pet food to veterinary students, and free prescription diets to the University's veterinary hospital for use with hospitalized animals. Is it any wonder that most vets come out of school recommending that manufacturer's products?
In the 1980’s, Hill’s emerged as the top player in the novel, specialty foods arena. This crafty company had effectively assessed the changing pet healthcare market and sought to carve out a niche within it, thereby circumventing the mass-market power of the Purina behemoth. Through its association with our vet schools, it developed a specialized approach to addressing specific diseases through nutrition.We ate it all up. Not only did Hill’s make pet food sexy with their well-designed packaging and vet school-oriented marketing, they made us vets feel like we were doing something good for our patients—without even trying. It was a win-win for the profession—and an understandable element in the evolution of the veterinary industry.[...]We thought we knew all there was to know about nutrition, now that obvious nutritional diseases had become extinct. But how many diet-“related” diseases do we now see? We‘re not really sure. Do we even know whether these prescription foods really work? Not always. Not independently.
For those of you who skipped the first two posts on this subject, I’m talking about how we vets recommend food and the problems we confront in doing so. Sure, some of that has to do with industry pressure, especially when every other vet down the street is carrying the food the pet food companies are expecting you to offer. Some of it has to do with our education, whereby we were inculcated into the belief that prescription diets can help almost any pet. And some of it has to do with the reality of vet practice economics, in which industry expectations, education and lack of resources (especially when starting out) can move you to sell foods to make up for the services you can’t yet move quickly or profitably enough.Here’s where you might think all vets are in the pockets of the pet food companies—whether they think they are or not. And that may be true. But most of us recommend certain pet foods because we either know no better (for reasons related to training, explained in the previous post), because we want to do what’s best for our patients, and/or because we have few acceptably safe alternatives. And then there are the greedy (for the record, I don’t believe that’s most of us)...I’m ashamed to admit that, in spite of some more enlightened practices out there, my profession is somewhat driven by the financial prospects of the existing pet food paradigm—that is, the powers that be in the profession still refuse to acknowledge that a large percentage of us continue to elect to benefit from the ready cash the pet food companies supply us through unique retail agreements with vet-only brands—despite the conflict of interest the relationship denotes.
ABOUT FULLY VETTEDPATTY KHULY, VMD, MBA...is a small animal veterinarian in Miami, Florida, where she practices medicine at Sunset Animal Clinic and serves on the board of the South Florida Veterinary Medical Association. She is a graduate of Wellesley College, the University of Pennsylvania School of Veterinary Medicine, and The Wharton School of Business.As a significant sideline, she writes...a lot. Apart from her daily blogging here at PetMD's FullyVetted, she authors weekly pet health columns for USA Today and The Miami Herald. She also writes a popular monthly column for Veterinary Practice News and serves as regular contributor to Veterinary Economics, The Bark, and the Veterinary News Network.Dr. Khuly lives in South Miami with her brood of hens, goats, dogs, cats...and humans.
Her current blog at PET MDhttp://www.petmd.com/blogs/fullyvetted
She can't say the stuff she used to any longer because she writes weekly for mainstream mediot "papers" now.That's probably why the selected Dolitter articles of hers, which I used to cite often, have apparently evaporated from existence.