The Thousand Dollar Answer

An owner naturally wants to know why their dog is having trouble breathing. In corporate veterinary medicine there's a twenty-one-thousand-dollar answer to that question. By the time the neurology consult, urinalysis, CT scan and MRI plus myelogram are done - chest Xrays, transtracehal wash and culture with cytology are done - you're in twenty one thousand dollars and guess what.

There were only TWO treatable conditions to begin with. So, that whole search was looking for things you COULD NOT TREAT TO BEGIN WITH.

And BOTH could have been treated safely and the diagnosis of "not cancer" or "not heartworms" among other possibilities could have saved you twenty thousand five hundred and sixty dollars.

There's a "thousand dollar answer" to a lot of pointless questions in Vet Medicine. We'll treat the treatables - and ignore the untreatables. Failure to respond to any therapy for the TREATABLE possibilities will leave us with a 'low cost' "diagnosis-by-exclusion" that it's one of the UN-treatables, for example; cancer or a spinal lesion, a surgical problem or intractable mental/brain issues. There are answers to the exact type, cause and prognosis of this situation, ranging from Xrays to Ultrasound/echo (to diagnose treatable conditions) and MRI and CATscans to diagnose UN-treatable conditions. The reward to those diagnostics might be pointless. VERY often you can bypass diagnostics with the Therapeutic-Diagnosis Method.