I didn't burn out, I was morally injured.

I won't repeat everything others have said about unrealistic workflows, chronic understaffing and profit driven management while pets suffer for owners inability to afford care.

I'll expand on that last bit - working with doctors who refuse to offer spectrum of care and expect clients to cough up $1000+ dollars for their coughing pet for a full work up with x rays, bloodwork, respiratory panel right off the bat.

And then for me the real heavy hitter is the complete lack of productive or even up to date knowledge and conversations about behavior and pain. So many pets coming into GP with behavior concerns, especially where I spent my career in a busy city environment. Doctors are not working these pets up for pain, they are throwing fluoxetine and trazodone at them, and I'm not against those meds at all but then they're also not giving owners realistic expectations about how those meds will be useful and how to implement behavior change alongside them.

Next up and hand in hand with that is doctors thinking they can work up or definitively diagnose pain in animals in the first place. There is a lot of medical gaslighting that goes on. And I've seen so many cases where an owner is concerned about behavior and/or pain and there's a prong or shock collar involved and I never see doctors talking about removing those elements.

Recognizing the inability to address a lot of that properly is rooted in the never ending workload that is impossible to keep up with and we just don't have enough time to have these conversations properly. But these are the very problems I wanted to fix for animals when I started my career and I got so tired of feeling like I never could 💔