[snapetom]

Married to a boarded vet of over 20 years. She's been through the era of working for privately owned clinics and now the PE-dominated landscape. 100% agree with you. The comments here range from short-sighted to plain-old stupid, especially those complaining about costs.

What many fail to realize is that vet care went through a professionalization in the 80's and 90's. Boards and specializations that humans had like dermatology and cardiology cropped up and really exploded in the past 20 years or so. Along with that was quality of care, and along with that, cost.

What frequently happens is this: If you go to a clinic with an old-school vet, he'll charge $300 for a dog spay. Down the road with the younger vet, she'll charge $600, but that's because she's running a wider blood panel with a course of anti-biotics. She won't do the surgery without it because research shows that course improves survivability by 50%.

Which are you going to choose? Don't kid yourself in thinking the quality of care is the same. Business and veterinary schools have researched this to death. You can't cheap out and get the same care.

Maybe you'll find a young vet that's willing to skip the extras, but many won't. The worst thing to happen to vet care is Yelp and Dr. Google who emboldens self-righteous hacks to complain to state boards at every little thing they think the vet did wrong.

Finally tons of people flat out belittle the cost of labor. Vets go to school a minimum of 4 years post college. They can practice right out of vet school, but many go through an internship these days. If you go to a specialist, that's an extra 1-2 years of internships and another 2-3 years of a residency and a board exam, too. On top of that, many states require veterinary assistants to be licensed, which is equivalent to an AA. In practice, most have bachelor's these days and we've known a few with master's degrees.

Meanwhile, people bitch and moan here for $500 a night of emergency care, ignoring the fact you're hiring a team of highly trained and educated people to take care of your precious Fluffy.

[romanows]

50% survivability increase, but is that going from 2/10000 to 1/10000 deaths? My impression is that spaying is relatively safe, so how much are we willing to spend to get more 9's?

Edit: deleted distracting details that the comment below rightfully calls out.

[snapetom]

> for healthy animals

this is the key part of your statement. Many animals for many diseases appear healthy but don't until a work up in done.

[romanows]

My fault, I shouldn't have mentioned that because it's not my key point. Given animals that come in to be spayed, say in a large US city, how risky is spaying? Is it worth everyone paying $300 more to reduce it by a very small absolute percentage? Should vets actually be more up front about this than the ones I'm familiar with are?

[snapetom]

I get you're saying it's not the key point, but in practice, it really should be.

The spay and cost numbers were just examples. In general, yes, spays are safe, but it is anesthesia. There's a risk of death and it gets much more complicated with a huge variety of factors - age of the animal, species, whether she is in heat, and of course like we mentioned - pre-existing conditions that do not obviously present itself without a clinical workup. The last one is huge. There are plenty of values that are indicative of organ failure that would not be obvious to an owner. A dog can't tell you it's been having a nagging pain on its side for the past week.

[fsn4dN69ey]

Thanks! Glad to see someone else with similar experiences. The other issue I think people are overlooking is... 20 years ago you would present to your local, low-cost veterinarian, and they wouldn't know what the issue was (or they knew and couldnt treat it), and your animal would just die.

Now we have a ton more information, a ton more training, and an issue now that would be game-ending prior is now treatable, but it comes at a cost. We see the same patterns in human medicine too. A lot of it has to do with demographics and cultural shifts in my opinion, as well as the supply/demand factor of trained practitioners.