Every time you say vets are money grubbing, or ‘too expensive’ or just in it for the money.
Every time you decline all diagnostics yet demand to know ‘what’s wrong with my pet’
Every time at a social function or other completely inappropriate
place you find out that someone is a vet you ask them for free advice
about your animal.
Every time you feel justified posting a shitty practice or vet review
when everything was done according to the standard of care but your pet
died anyway.
Every time YOUR lack of preventative care resulted in your pets early death yet you blame the veterinarian.
Every time she gets in early and stays late and works an 80 hour week
because your pet that had been ill for days suddenly becomes an
emergency at 5pm on a Friday and you demand to be seen – claiming these
heartless vets won’t treat your baby.
Every time someone says ‘why didn’t you become a real doctor?’
Every time someone complains about the cost of veterinary care…
comparing human medicine and insurance subsidies to pet ownership
(totally voluntary btw).
Every time that someone doesn’t pay their bill and thinks that they are entitled not to because pet ownership is their ‘right’.
Every time someone walks in to a clinic and threatens to ‘sue your ass if you make one mistake with my baby’.
Every time a graduate vet looks at the hundreds of thousands of
dollars in crippling debt and listens to clients driving Mercedes and
bmws complain about the cost of a spay using good anesthetic care and
adequate pain management.
Every time… You are part of the problem.
The problem is suicide in veterinarians. Most of us went to
veterinary school because we care. We have a calling to care…. but there
is a dark and expensive cost to compassion.
Think before you act or speak.
Author: Tamara Vetro Widenhouse, DVM
you know???
i can see how (poor is what i said before but that has an unintended double meaning) bad pet owners are a huge problem. it’s part of the problem i couldn’t do this job. i’ve read horror stories of vets talking of first-time clients bringing severely neglected animals and acting clueless as to why they’re unhealthy, etc
but the cost of vet school is NOT my fault, as a client
i have a very positive and trusting relationship with my vet, i follow her recommendations and work with her, and so i don’t feel necessarily that this is aimed at me, but crippling debt and comparatively/proportionately poor pay is not my fault. the inflation of vet school costs is a huge problem and i don’t remotely understand why this post isn’t emphasizing that more
Nobody is saying it is your (or anyone else’s) fault. Most vets accept that it’s never going to be a high paying position. Just slightly higher than average. What vets (and students) ARE complaining about is that despite the fact that vets are often underpaid for their work, in addition to massive debt, that there are people who would dare say that most vets are just “greedy and in it for the money and don’t actually care about animals”
like I said I do completely acknowledge that as a problem but it seems like we’re shifting the blame here from where it should be (inflated tuition and inflation in other areas, the prohibitive cost of Healthcare procedures that bring up the price and lower the vets margins, etc) to the consumer, and when the blame is for something as serious as literal suicide I couldn’t ignore that
Here’s the thing though, it’s the words you hear every day that get to you.
A vet school is expensive to run. It requires a lot of high tech equipment and the keeping of a lot of animals, which makes it more expensive to run than a human medical school. Even in Australia where the courses are subsidized as mine was, I’m still paying it off and my wages here are lower than they would have been in the USA to reflect that difference. And even with our procedures being relatively cheaper than the USA, we still get regularly reamed over the cost of pet care.
And we could live with it. We get warned at the start that you wont be paid well, and that’s okay because none of us went into vet for the money.
But when you’re stuck between a tight financial situation on one side, and people constantly telling you that you must make so much money and that’s all you care about and how heartless and cruel you are on the other… it definitely weighs you down.
Honestly, even if vet wages never rise, just getting the ‘money hungry vets’ narrative to stop would help so much.
An individual can’t change the whole system, but we can change how we approach each other on a one-on-one level.
The only thing that gets me shit fucking arse over tits angry immediately is the denial of Irish slavery and the history of how we were genocided and forced to run or die.
No, it was not because of our skin colour, but we weren’t considered human.
It is not comparable to the African slave trade, or the genocides of WW2, but it happened and it’s disgusting and disrespectful to try and erase over 800 years of horrendous pain, suffering, and the destruction of our culture.
No one is saying “ohhoho whites were slaves too” here, because our rotten history is not defined by race relations. The British knew we were white, but we were white animals. Barbarians. Subhuman, and only good for ploughing fields, raping, and beating the shit out of.
Don’t misunderstand tho, yeah a lot of us were herded like cattle and sent to work in places like the Caribbean too. Some worked the fields and others were told to hold the whip, and that was disgraceful. Yes there were Irish who were bent over backwards to screw over the other slaves to earn Master’s favour. We know this, I know this, and would not deny it despite the shame that comes with it.
But for every one slave who got “lucky” (I cringe at using that term) there were countless breaking themselves in the heat or collapsing, hollow-cheeked with distended bellies, back home in Ireland, dying by the literal thousands from starvation that the scumfuck Brits just let happen. “Sure they were only fuckin Toms and Paddys anyway.”
Please remember, next time you want to deny anything bad ever happened to us, it was not long ago there were signs all over America depicting “no blacks, no dogs, no Irish.”
We wouldn’t erase or deny your history so please don’t do it to us
we had a mini-unit in my apush class on anti-irish discrimination and it was genuinely saddening how few people knew about it, not to mention the amount of people who tried to act like it was irrelevant in comparison to the enslavement of african americans… like, those two forms of slavery / discrimination aren’t comparable first off (like op said, only one involved race relations), and second off they can both be regarded as atrocities without invalidating the experiences of the other group.
i live next to a canal that was dug almost entirely through the labor of irish immigrants in the early 1800s. why specifically irish immigrants? because they were so discriminated against in society that they really only had the option of doing heavy manual labor- no one else wanted to hire the irish because they were considered to be lesser-than-human. these immigrants were paid the lowest wages possible, because as i mentioned it wasn’t like they had any other job options, and the overseers knew this and exploited it.
many workers died from mistreatment and overwork because the overseers only cared about how much labor they could squeeze from them, not their welfare. this was because the irish immigrants were not the property of the overseers- unlike african american slaves, who were considered “investments” by their masters. the lives of irish workers held no monetary value to overseers, and so they could be worked to death with no loss in profit. unsurprisingly, death at the work-site was extremely common.
the worst part of the apush unit, to me, was when i read in a primary source from one of these construction overseers that they didn’t care if the irish immigrants died during the construction project- in fact, they welcomed it, because the death of a worker in the middle of a workday meant that the overseer would not have to pay them for the labor they had finished prior to their death.
so yeah. long story short, don’t let anyone tell you that irish people haven’t experienced discrimination just because they were white. the mistreatment of and discrimination against irish immigrants in america was a terrible period in our history and should never be forgotten or brushed aside, and we also shouldn’t try to compare it to the enslavement of african americans because they are two very different situations.
wait: anakin only had one gene donor. the only genes he’s carrying, apparently, are his mother’s, and the force bullshitted the rest. so, if you were to try and clone him – wouldn’t you just get clones of shmi?
imagine palpatine trying to clone vader and ending up teenage shmi skywalker, here to fuck you up
That might explain Rey…
That… That’s.. A shockingly good idea. It helps that it fits the casting perfectly.
If this were the case, it would mean that Rey could legitimately say to Luke “I am your father.”
For friends not in the spoonie community, this is about the CDC’s recent guidelines that attempt to combat drug addiction in America by severely restricting access to opioid medications for ALL patients except for terminal cancer patients.
Without opioid pain medications, I would have had to quit working and go on disability nine years before I did.
Without opioid pain medications I would have been housebound and dependent on caregivers for another 10 years after that.
Without opioid pain medications I will be less active, more sedentary, and more sick.
The CDC says opioids don’t work for chronic pain; they’re wrong. They don’t work for some chronic pain. They don’t cure chronic pain. But they make life liveable for millions of chronic pain patients. Estimates of chronic pain sufferers in America range from a low of 39 million to a high of 110 million. That low-water mark excluded people with intermittent chronic pain, like endometriosis or migraine, as well as omitting people with neurogenic pain. Most reasonable guesses put the number at 70–80 million.
The cure for drug abuse and addiction has nothing to do with restricting pain patients’ access to medication, or forcing them to give up what quality of life they have managed to attain through having their pain managed with medication.
It’s not about labeling pain patients as addicts for taking medication to which they can build a physical dependence. (By that definition, every time I go on prednisone and have to taper off it, I’m a prednisone addict!)
It’s not about calling a patient in chronic pain asking their doctor for relief a drug-seeker.
The cure lies in combating the issues that lead to drug abuse, like poverty and an economy that sees the rich getting richer while the poor and middle class fall further and further behind. It lies in giving hope to people in hopeless situations. Not taking hope away from several million more.
Reblog to educate the normals. We need a cultural perception shift, and it needs to start now.
I make a hobby of watching documentaries about heroin (don’t ask) and all of them in recent years have a terrifying but obvious agenda: opioid pain reliever restriction.
They harp on the fact that a high percentage of heroin addicts began by taking prescription painkillers, but they never bring up how many prescription painkiller users become heroin users. Every time I watch one, they get to the part where addicts (current and recovering) talk about how they started on oxy/vic/perc after an injury and eventually moved to heroin, almost universally it’s because the pills got too hard to get, and I get irritated. Usually the pills are blamed for the transition to heroin, despite the fact that earlier in the documentaries the same individuals often speak about prior addictive behavior with pot and alcohol. (Very rarely is Purdue Pharma’s incredibly troubling insistence on misprescription addressed – and when it is, it too includes the “pain pills to heroin” narrative.)
Quick Google stats: there were 259 million painkiller prescriptions written in 2012. That same year heroin use was estimated at 2 people per 1000, meaning with a population of 314 million and given a likelihood of under-reporting, we had roughly 6-700 thousand heroin addicts in the US. At most, a million.
So even if many of those prescriptions were for the same people, and even if every single heroin addict was the direct result of a pain pill prescription (not super duper likely), the vast majority of people who got prescription painkillers somehow, magically, didn’t become addicted to heroin.
It’s almost like addiction involves multiple emotional, physical, genetic, and environmental factors that have nothing to do with prescription pain relief but opioids are an easy scapegoat for grieving families to pin their pain to.
I see the points being raised here, but at the same time as a massage therapist I feel like there should be different options for managing pain other than taking pills that have potential negative side effects (entirely separate from the issue of addiction, which is a very real thing: Vicodin was the gateway drug for my sister, who wound up killing herself).
What I would like to see happen is for insurance companies to start paying for complementary and alternative medicine–like massage and acupuncture–at the same rate that they have been prescribing opioids. There are so many other options out there and I really hope that this national conversation will push the medical field in that direction.
I would prefer insurance companies cover whatever helps people – but this isn’t the place to talk about that. We’re talking about people who have tried the other options and have been left with pain pills as a last option. I also know people who have addiction problems related to pain medication, and I’m sorry for your loss – but we should treat that with a better system for addiction, not by hurting chronic pain patients
“But people become dependent on these” well yeah because without them they have a very poor quality of life. It’s almost like people who take their prescriptions start feeling better and seeing improvements??? So they continue to take their prescriptions????
^^^ exactly. i’m dependent on not feeling like shit.
When I did the numbers on this the other day, using the National Pain Report’s numbers on chronic pain patients, and cross-checking them with the ADA’s numbers on other illnesses, what I came up with was this:
10K deaths from opioid pills specifically.
100 million Americans with chronic pain.
.0001 percent of Americans with chronic pain will die from opioid overdose.
That’s what is called “statistically insignificant.”
For perspective, a woman is twice as likely to die in childbirth in the developed world as a chronic pain patient is to die of an opioid overdose. Why aren’t we talking about the ‘epidemic’ of women dying in childbirth? You’re as likely to be killed by lightning which first hit someone else. WILL NO ONE THINK OF THE LIGHTNING EPIDEMIC?
For contrast, using the ADA’s numbers for diabetics n the US, .004 percent of diabetics die directly from complications of diabetes every year. While that’s still a tiny number compared to the population, not only is it orders of magnitude larger in percentages, but 65K people died from complications of diabetes.
Six and a half times as many! Six and a half!
And that’s not even talking about things like heart conditions and the like.
So I say this as a person who is currently and without shame on an opioid pain management plan (along with other solutions including massage, steroid shots, and other things that frankly aren’t anybody else’s business but whatever), and who has watched a very close friend lose her mother to diabetes complications this year… why are we okay with stigmatizing one medication (pain relief) over another type (insulin/diabetes).
Well, I mean, there really isn’t any money in “addiction counseling” for insulin. There are just deaths.
I wish people saw pain the same way, because pain will kill you too.
I’M DEPENDANT ON NOT FEELING LIKE SHIT! Oh my god. @painandcats Thank you for that sentence!!
20 years of “you’re too young to know what pain is”, “ I’m old and I have arthritis, you don’t know what pain is”, IT TOOK GETTING CANCER FOR MY FAMILY TO AGREE THAT I MIGHT BE IN PAIN. I have been disabled since I was 14 (or 6, depending on which pain related ailment you look at).
Now I have oxycodone. Now my home is clean. Now I am involved in caring for my son. Now I can walk my dogs. Now I can face the prospect of having a service dog. Now I can go to church regularly. Now I can be active in my church group. Now I can hang out with my friends without spending 3 days recovering.
the right: i want a woman to cook and clean and fuck
the left: omg…..girls?????? girls are soooooo soft……and soo good at organizing??? god i love how they organize their closets it’s soo cute…i just…wow…ugh date a girl who’s cute and soft and cooks for you
one of the ways i know this culture has a massive issue with consent
is the sheer amount of people I’ve known that just lie & tell people they’re deathly allergic to foods they dislike
because otherwise people will hound them, mock them, coax them, harass them, try to force them to eat it, or even trick them into eating it, and they will never hear the end of it
your coworkers will bake it into a fucking pie, call it something else, and wait til your birthday, gather everyone and their first cousins to sit around in a circle waiting for you to put a forkful into your mouth and then point rhythmically at you in a chanting, glaring, sweating, unholy circle like SWISS CHARD SWISS CHARD YOU JUST ATE SWISS CHARD HA HA HA SWISS CHARD NOW YOU LIKE SWISS CHARD
Because forcing someone into a situation where they don’t feel safe declining putting something into their body they’d rather not be there is totes 100% wholesome American fun
And this is something so known that it’s infinitely easier to just lie and tell people that you’ll die if you eat that food…which actually doesn’t always stop it from happening
Death By Catchphrase 