What Human Doctors Can Learn From Vets
Who gets more respect: doctors or veterinarians? Veterinarians like to joke that physicians are vets who only know how to take care of one species. But that joke is only funny because of the usual pecking order: Doctors who treat humans are seen, and see themselves, as occupying the more knowledgeable and skilled position.
Barbara Natterson-Horowitz, a cardiologist at the University of California Los Angeles, wants to turn that assumption on its head. She believes that her fellow human physicians have much to learn from their veterinary counterparts—and that we shouldn’t see human and animal medicine as separate fields. During a stint moonlighting as a cardiologist for animals at the Los Angeles Zoo, she became fascinated with the similarities between veterinary diseases and human ones. Now she’s on a mission to raise the status of animal medicine and convince doctors to cross the species divide.
In a new book coauthored with science writer Kathryn Bowers, “Zoobiquity: What Animals Can Teach Us About Health and the Science of Healing,” Natterson-Horowitz details surprising similarities between human and animal disease. Animals get cancer, heart disease, and influenza, but they also get medical problems we think of as purely human. Fish faint, marmots get obese, stallions struggle with sexual performance problems, koalas get chlamydia, and animals of all kinds self-injure when faced with stress, isolation, and boredom.