Talia
Guénady
September 30, 2008
TALIA
Another Tragedy of Veterinary Incompetence ?
my Talia... »
Two simple words, but they reveal more eloquently than paragraphs the pain of a broken heart.
I'm going to scatter my Talia's ashes in the woods, where we used to walk together...' A final claim of ownership, of connection, before the inevitable, wrenching, unavoidable letting go...
my Talia...'
Time, a great deal of time, will bring a certain dulling, as to any wound when scar tissue forms on it. One learns how to live with what can never be undone, never repaired. In a year, the aching will be less sharp, but it will be there still, always and forever. Even in two years... Even in twenty... We who know this pain carry it with us, deep inside, certainly for all the years we will live, and we will take it finally with us into our own graves, for from this affliction we never 'recover', we only learn to 'adapt'.
We bring our so-much-loved animals in trust to Doctors of Veterinary Medicine because we don't know how to help them when they are hurt or sick. We want them to have the medical care we think they need. We want what is best for them and we are willing to pay, and to pay a lot, for the years of study and practice that have gone into making an 'expert' in animal health. We don't want our pets to suffer, nor even to be uncomfortable. So we deliver up what is so precious to us, so irreplaceable, unable to imagine that those who profess to know what they are doing, who say they are committed to our same goal might really only be harried, stressed, overworked and undereducated, sometimes merely intellectually lazy, but in any case too prone to taking shortcuts, to doing things in a rush, without reflexion, without advice from elsewhere, be it just a reference book on pharmaceutical products, without even a glance at the Client Information Sheet prepared by manufacturers and automatically accompanying (or at least it should) every veterinary drug. These experts are, after all, certified Doctors of Veterinary Medicine, and they are supposed to know what they are doing. And if you talk to them individually for long enough, you will find that the great majority consider themselves right up there next to God and Doctors for People... that is, infallible and all-knowing... until their weighty egos butt against the concrete reality of their failures... too often avoidable, useless, unnecessary failures. Then, with the truth staring them straight in their fat faces, they struggle to keep up the façade, the mystic of always being right. And not just for the sake of their egos, but also to head off legal liability. In which case they transform their errors into the fault of the patient who didn't respond as he or she was supposed to, who had the bad manners to have an adverse reaction... sometimes even to succumb... and all too often according to well-defined symptoms described on the Client Information Sheet that the infallible Vet neglected to read... Because of course demi-gods, by definition, know all they need to know without having to look at Client Information Sheets, don't they? So the unlucky pet owner gets back his even more unlucky pet dead, or dying, or maimed for life, and of course it's not the Vet's fault...
If you are naive enough to ask for laboratory analyses to find out the truth, you will find that the labs will take specimens for analyses only from your vet, meaning that they are fully informed of the circumstances of your controversy, and they will (with, thank God, a few exceptions who retain integrity) adapt their findings to what is required to cover up a colleague's mistake. After a death or two, the latter may figure the lesson out, but likely enough only in regard to that one drug, leaving open the possibility of more 'hard-learned' lessons, paid for by our pets, and with our broken hearts... How is it possible that Veterinary Medicine has come to this?
Usually, when I ask this question, someone will jump to answer, 'Well, it's the same situation for people, you know.' Yes, I know. That's why I avoid doctors. But we are told that it is harder to get into Veterinary School than it is to get into Medical School, to treat people. Yes, the same mistakes are made with people, with the same consequences, and similar coverups afterwards. But how is it possible that 'medicine' has come to this?
Many people are now aware of the information contained in the 2005 report published by the Nutrition Institute of America ( see : http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2003/11/26/death-by-medicine-part-one.aspx ) which presents an analysis of the official statistics on adverse drug reactions, indicating that these reactions cause more deaths annually in the U.S. than those from either cancer or heart disease! Which means that Public Health Enemy Number One is the Doctor and Prescription Medicine. Enough to shock any true believer, as most of us who make up the Public have been conditioned to be.
One of that study's authors, Dr Carolyn Dean, went on to write a highly informative article, 'Big Pharma Just Bought Your Dog and Might Put You in Jail?'
( see : http://www.newswithviews.com/Dean/carolyn14.htm )
in which she shows how Big Pharma has moved into veterinary medicine as a lucrative new market, and at the same time is trying to block and forbid any use of holistic or natural remedies in place of pharmaceuticals... the end goal being to augment the earning power of veterinarians on both sides of the Atlantic (which, we may infer, is the point of the activity for many veterinarians), and let the chips, and the pets, fall where they may...
Yes, we do know that there are veterinarians who have a true vocation to alleviate animal suffering, and of course we also know that even they can make mistakes. But mistakes due to ignorance or negligence should be nipped in the bud by the discipline and procedures taught in veterinary schools. We know, too, that there are many deeply committed and consciencious veterinarians who are working, despite industry pressure, away from pharmaceuticals and more and more into natural therapies and healing. We applaud these veterinarians and we all hope to find one... Because unless we do, our pet might be the next accident and victim, and ours might be the next betrayed confidence and broken heart...
Somewhere in France, sometime recently...
Talia was a beautiful six-year-old labrador crossbreed who one day had a small problem with her right hind leg. Perhaps a twisted ligament. In any case, nothing life-threatening.
The veterinarian consulted decided to take x-rays, and in preparation for this, to 'calm' the dog, he told the owner that he had to give a tranquilizer. And so he administered an injection of zoletil 100 (at 15h20). The dog was left with him and the family told to return for her at 18h45.
The xrays were taken and the dog, according to the veterinarian's written report, revived normally. She was put into a cage in the cage room and left there to recover. In the same report, the veterinarian says that at 16h30 the dog was already barking loudly. The only reaction this barking ellicted from the veterinarian was annoyance. He and his staff considered calling the owner to come get the dog earlier than arranged. The loud barking continued up to 17h40, that is for more than an hour, when an assistant, gone into the cage room to take out another animal, found Talia was having a seizure.
The veterinarian writes in his report that he immediately carried out an eletrocardiogram, to discover that the dog was in cardiac arrest with ventricular fibrillation.
According to the MERCK online Manual on ventricular fibrillation: '...if the disorder is not rapidly treated, death follows... Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) must be started within a few minutes, and it must be followed by defibrillation (an electrical shock delivered to the chest) to restore normal heart rhythm... It [ventricular fibrillation] is fatal unless treated immediately... The most common cause of ventricular fibrillation is inadequate blood flow to the heart muscle due to coronary artery disease, as occurs during a heart attack. Other causes include the following : Shock (very low blood pressure...)... Electrical shock... Drowning... Very low levels of potassium in the blood (hypokalemia)... Drugs that affect electrical currents in the heart...'
Having spent precious minutes on the electrocardiogram, the veterinarian finally began heart massage, which he says he kept up for twenty minutes, but which failed. As the family arrived to retrieve Talia (18h45) while this procedure was still in progress, we can ascertain the amount of time wasted at the critical moments when every second counted...
Should the veterinarian have started CPR ( resuscitation) immediately, given the condition of the animal, without needing an ECG to confirm what was seems to have been clearly apparent? Still more pertinant, should the veterinarian have reacted earlier, hearing the loud and insistant barking, and should he have at least gone to check on the animal in the cage room? The answers to these questions do not (no surprise) figure in the veterinarian's written report.
YouTube has a number of videos of firefighters giving CPR in the form of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to pets outside burning buildings. If those non-veterinarians who deal with emergencies can learn to practice CPR (in fact, anyone can learn to practice CPR on an animal, find instructions here :
then why can't a veterinarian be counted on to practice this technique when needed?
Talia's family arrived to recover their dog, only to find the veterinarian engaged in cardiac massage, to no avail. Instead of the healthy animal, despite the injured hind leg, that they had confided three hours earlier, they found themselves the owners of a corpse.
In the veterinarian's written report, drawn up at the end of the same day, he gives a full paragraph to HIS surprise and anger that the son of Talia's owner, witness to the scene, expressed his disbelief in the veterinarian's immediate explanation for Talia's death, that is, 'an undetected and undetectable(!)' heart disease which was responsible for the reaction to the drug. And yet, laymen that we are, when we consult the Client Information Sheet, we read (translated from French, emphasis ours) :
Zolétil - In strong doses -Excessive salivation (reduced by atropine) -- muscular spasms –vomiting –nervousness, BARKING –short periods of apnea --high blood pressure –tachycardia. A RESPIRATORY DEPRESSION MAY BE INDUCED AFTER ADMINISTRATION OF HIGH DOSES. IF THIS DEPRESSION BECOMES TOO GREAT, THE ANIMAL CAN BECOME CYANOTIC [NB : discolored due to lack of oxygen in the blood]. REANIMATION MEASURES MUST THEN BE IMMEDIATELY TAKEN, SUCH AS ARTIFICIAL RESPIRATION OR THE USE OF OXYGEN...'
We ask ourselves why the veterinarian did not react to the dog's persistent and insistent barking, other than to feel annoyed... He did not even go to check on the animal in the cage room. By chance, after what he admits in his report to being more than an hour of loud barking, an assistant, who went into the cage room for another animal, noticed that Talia was having a seizure and breathing with difficulty. Instead of immediately carrying out reanimation, the veterinarian made an electrocardiogram! Only afterwards, after the loss of precious time, did the veterinarian begin cardiac massage... which failed.
In the veterinarian's report, written in the heat of the moment, during the evening of the day of Talia's death (or at least that is the claim in the report), the veterinarian expresses righteous indignation that the son of Talia's owner, witness to the failed attempt at cardiac massage, did not believe his conclusion that the dog had a previous undetected, and UNDETECTABLE, heart disease... He counseled the family, he writes, to have an autopsy done BY A FRIEND OF HIS at a veterinary school, FOLLOWED BY INCINERATION. We change nothing in the advice given by this veterinarian : an autopsy carried out by someone he recommended, followed by incineration... Why the recommendation of someone he knew to carry out the autopsy? Why the inclusion of the advice to incinerate immediately after the autopsy? Why would it come to this veterinarian's mind at such a moment to advise the rapid destruction of the corpse?
Faced with the son's frank refusal to believe the veterinarian's explanation for Talia's death, the family nevertheless followed this advice, and the autopsy was carried out by the pathologist recommended. The conclusion? The family was right, Talia did not die of a previously undetected and undetectable heart disease... She died of a previously undetected brain condition... Also undetectable? We can ask ourselves many questions... But there will never be formal answers, for Talia was incinerated, according to the veterinarian's advice.
Morale : Choose your veterinarian wisely. The day of a crisis, you won't have time to go looking for someone worthy of your trust. And even a non-emergency can be transformed into a life-and-death situation in the hands of a negligent, incompetent 'professional'. Such a one is an embarrassment to those vets who are trying so hard in difficult circumstances. They don't need more bad trust and more bad images for their profession.
Rest in peace, Talia, sweet innocent victim... You are our Talia, too. And we will never forget you, nor what happened to you... And we will warn everyone, so that the lesson of what happened to you may prevent at least a few potentially similar errors in the future.
Either we go the route of 'No Drugs', or we find a vet who uses them and who is worthy of our trust.
Let us all choose, then do the legwork TODAY. Tomorrow may prove too late for the well-being of those we love...
Another Tragedy of Veterinary Incompetence ?
my Talia... »
Two simple words, but they reveal more eloquently than paragraphs the pain of a broken heart.
I'm going to scatter my Talia's ashes in the woods, where we used to walk together...' A final claim of ownership, of connection, before the inevitable, wrenching, unavoidable letting go...
my Talia...'
Time, a great deal of time, will bring a certain dulling, as to any wound when scar tissue forms on it. One learns how to live with what can never be undone, never repaired. In a year, the aching will be less sharp, but it will be there still, always and forever. Even in two years... Even in twenty... We who know this pain carry it with us, deep inside, certainly for all the years we will live, and we will take it finally with us into our own graves, for from this affliction we never 'recover', we only learn to 'adapt'.
We bring our so-much-loved animals in trust to Doctors of Veterinary Medicine because we don't know how to help them when they are hurt or sick. We want them to have the medical care we think they need. We want what is best for them and we are willing to pay, and to pay a lot, for the years of study and practice that have gone into making an 'expert' in animal health. We don't want our pets to suffer, nor even to be uncomfortable. So we deliver up what is so precious to us, so irreplaceable, unable to imagine that those who profess to know what they are doing, who say they are committed to our same goal might really only be harried, stressed, overworked and undereducated, sometimes merely intellectually lazy, but in any case too prone to taking shortcuts, to doing things in a rush, without reflexion, without advice from elsewhere, be it just a reference book on pharmaceutical products, without even a glance at the Client Information Sheet prepared by manufacturers and automatically accompanying (or at least it should) every veterinary drug. These experts are, after all, certified Doctors of Veterinary Medicine, and they are supposed to know what they are doing. And if you talk to them individually for long enough, you will find that the great majority consider themselves right up there next to God and Doctors for People... that is, infallible and all-knowing... until their weighty egos butt against the concrete reality of their failures... too often avoidable, useless, unnecessary failures. Then, with the truth staring them straight in their fat faces, they struggle to keep up the façade, the mystic of always being right. And not just for the sake of their egos, but also to head off legal liability. In which case they transform their errors into the fault of the patient who didn't respond as he or she was supposed to, who had the bad manners to have an adverse reaction... sometimes even to succumb... and all too often according to well-defined symptoms described on the Client Information Sheet that the infallible Vet neglected to read... Because of course demi-gods, by definition, know all they need to know without having to look at Client Information Sheets, don't they? So the unlucky pet owner gets back his even more unlucky pet dead, or dying, or maimed for life, and of course it's not the Vet's fault...
If you are naive enough to ask for laboratory analyses to find out the truth, you will find that the labs will take specimens for analyses only from your vet, meaning that they are fully informed of the circumstances of your controversy, and they will (with, thank God, a few exceptions who retain integrity) adapt their findings to what is required to cover up a colleague's mistake. After a death or two, the latter may figure the lesson out, but likely enough only in regard to that one drug, leaving open the possibility of more 'hard-learned' lessons, paid for by our pets, and with our broken hearts... How is it possible that Veterinary Medicine has come to this?
Usually, when I ask this question, someone will jump to answer, 'Well, it's the same situation for people, you know.' Yes, I know. That's why I avoid doctors. But we are told that it is harder to get into Veterinary School than it is to get into Medical School, to treat people. Yes, the same mistakes are made with people, with the same consequences, and similar coverups afterwards. But how is it possible that 'medicine' has come to this?
Many people are now aware of the information contained in the 2005 report published by the Nutrition Institute of America ( see : http://articles.mercola.com/sites/articles/archive/2003/11/26/death-by-medicine-part-one.aspx ) which presents an analysis of the official statistics on adverse drug reactions, indicating that these reactions cause more deaths annually in the U.S. than those from either cancer or heart disease! Which means that Public Health Enemy Number One is the Doctor and Prescription Medicine. Enough to shock any true believer, as most of us who make up the Public have been conditioned to be.
One of that study's authors, Dr Carolyn Dean, went on to write a highly informative article, 'Big Pharma Just Bought Your Dog and Might Put You in Jail?'
( see : http://www.newswithviews.com/Dean/carolyn14.htm )
in which she shows how Big Pharma has moved into veterinary medicine as a lucrative new market, and at the same time is trying to block and forbid any use of holistic or natural remedies in place of pharmaceuticals... the end goal being to augment the earning power of veterinarians on both sides of the Atlantic (which, we may infer, is the point of the activity for many veterinarians), and let the chips, and the pets, fall where they may...
Yes, we do know that there are veterinarians who have a true vocation to alleviate animal suffering, and of course we also know that even they can make mistakes. But mistakes due to ignorance or negligence should be nipped in the bud by the discipline and procedures taught in veterinary schools. We know, too, that there are many deeply committed and consciencious veterinarians who are working, despite industry pressure, away from pharmaceuticals and more and more into natural therapies and healing. We applaud these veterinarians and we all hope to find one... Because unless we do, our pet might be the next accident and victim, and ours might be the next betrayed confidence and broken heart...
Somewhere in France, sometime recently...
Talia was a beautiful six-year-old labrador crossbreed who one day had a small problem with her right hind leg. Perhaps a twisted ligament. In any case, nothing life-threatening.
The veterinarian consulted decided to take x-rays, and in preparation for this, to 'calm' the dog, he told the owner that he had to give a tranquilizer. And so he administered an injection of zoletil 100 (at 15h20). The dog was left with him and the family told to return for her at 18h45.
The xrays were taken and the dog, according to the veterinarian's written report, revived normally. She was put into a cage in the cage room and left there to recover. In the same report, the veterinarian says that at 16h30 the dog was already barking loudly. The only reaction this barking ellicted from the veterinarian was annoyance. He and his staff considered calling the owner to come get the dog earlier than arranged. The loud barking continued up to 17h40, that is for more than an hour, when an assistant, gone into the cage room to take out another animal, found Talia was having a seizure.
The veterinarian writes in his report that he immediately carried out an eletrocardiogram, to discover that the dog was in cardiac arrest with ventricular fibrillation.
According to the MERCK online Manual on ventricular fibrillation: '...if the disorder is not rapidly treated, death follows... Cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) must be started within a few minutes, and it must be followed by defibrillation (an electrical shock delivered to the chest) to restore normal heart rhythm... It [ventricular fibrillation] is fatal unless treated immediately... The most common cause of ventricular fibrillation is inadequate blood flow to the heart muscle due to coronary artery disease, as occurs during a heart attack. Other causes include the following : Shock (very low blood pressure...)... Electrical shock... Drowning... Very low levels of potassium in the blood (hypokalemia)... Drugs that affect electrical currents in the heart...'
Having spent precious minutes on the electrocardiogram, the veterinarian finally began heart massage, which he says he kept up for twenty minutes, but which failed. As the family arrived to retrieve Talia (18h45) while this procedure was still in progress, we can ascertain the amount of time wasted at the critical moments when every second counted...
Should the veterinarian have started CPR ( resuscitation) immediately, given the condition of the animal, without needing an ECG to confirm what was seems to have been clearly apparent? Still more pertinant, should the veterinarian have reacted earlier, hearing the loud and insistant barking, and should he have at least gone to check on the animal in the cage room? The answers to these questions do not (no surprise) figure in the veterinarian's written report.
YouTube has a number of videos of firefighters giving CPR in the form of mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to pets outside burning buildings. If those non-veterinarians who deal with emergencies can learn to practice CPR (in fact, anyone can learn to practice CPR on an animal, find instructions here :
then why can't a veterinarian be counted on to practice this technique when needed?
Talia's family arrived to recover their dog, only to find the veterinarian engaged in cardiac massage, to no avail. Instead of the healthy animal, despite the injured hind leg, that they had confided three hours earlier, they found themselves the owners of a corpse.
In the veterinarian's written report, drawn up at the end of the same day, he gives a full paragraph to HIS surprise and anger that the son of Talia's owner, witness to the scene, expressed his disbelief in the veterinarian's immediate explanation for Talia's death, that is, 'an undetected and undetectable(!)' heart disease which was responsible for the reaction to the drug. And yet, laymen that we are, when we consult the Client Information Sheet, we read (translated from French, emphasis ours) :
Zolétil - In strong doses -Excessive salivation (reduced by atropine) -- muscular spasms –vomiting –nervousness, BARKING –short periods of apnea --high blood pressure –tachycardia. A RESPIRATORY DEPRESSION MAY BE INDUCED AFTER ADMINISTRATION OF HIGH DOSES. IF THIS DEPRESSION BECOMES TOO GREAT, THE ANIMAL CAN BECOME CYANOTIC [NB : discolored due to lack of oxygen in the blood]. REANIMATION MEASURES MUST THEN BE IMMEDIATELY TAKEN, SUCH AS ARTIFICIAL RESPIRATION OR THE USE OF OXYGEN...'
We ask ourselves why the veterinarian did not react to the dog's persistent and insistent barking, other than to feel annoyed... He did not even go to check on the animal in the cage room. By chance, after what he admits in his report to being more than an hour of loud barking, an assistant, who went into the cage room for another animal, noticed that Talia was having a seizure and breathing with difficulty. Instead of immediately carrying out reanimation, the veterinarian made an electrocardiogram! Only afterwards, after the loss of precious time, did the veterinarian begin cardiac massage... which failed.
In the veterinarian's report, written in the heat of the moment, during the evening of the day of Talia's death (or at least that is the claim in the report), the veterinarian expresses righteous indignation that the son of Talia's owner, witness to the failed attempt at cardiac massage, did not believe his conclusion that the dog had a previous undetected, and UNDETECTABLE, heart disease... He counseled the family, he writes, to have an autopsy done BY A FRIEND OF HIS at a veterinary school, FOLLOWED BY INCINERATION. We change nothing in the advice given by this veterinarian : an autopsy carried out by someone he recommended, followed by incineration... Why the recommendation of someone he knew to carry out the autopsy? Why the inclusion of the advice to incinerate immediately after the autopsy? Why would it come to this veterinarian's mind at such a moment to advise the rapid destruction of the corpse?
Faced with the son's frank refusal to believe the veterinarian's explanation for Talia's death, the family nevertheless followed this advice, and the autopsy was carried out by the pathologist recommended. The conclusion? The family was right, Talia did not die of a previously undetected and undetectable heart disease... She died of a previously undetected brain condition... Also undetectable? We can ask ourselves many questions... But there will never be formal answers, for Talia was incinerated, according to the veterinarian's advice.
Morale : Choose your veterinarian wisely. The day of a crisis, you won't have time to go looking for someone worthy of your trust. And even a non-emergency can be transformed into a life-and-death situation in the hands of a negligent, incompetent 'professional'. Such a one is an embarrassment to those vets who are trying so hard in difficult circumstances. They don't need more bad trust and more bad images for their profession.
Rest in peace, Talia, sweet innocent victim... You are our Talia, too. And we will never forget you, nor what happened to you... And we will warn everyone, so that the lesson of what happened to you may prevent at least a few potentially similar errors in the future.
Either we go the route of 'No Drugs', or we find a vet who uses them and who is worthy of our trust.
Let us all choose, then do the legwork TODAY. Tomorrow may prove too late for the well-being of those we love...
Print
Email
