by Rachael Joseph

Created on: August 26, 2009   Last Updated: August 27, 2009

Finding not only a good veterinarian but a great one can be extremely difficult. I worked as a veterinary technician for fifteen years and personally believe word of mouth is the best way to select a veterinarian. If you have several friends who are pet owners or work in the veterinary industry, find out where they take their pets for annual exams, emergency exams and so on. I would even suggest having several friends over for a "dog play-date" to discuss your local veterinarians and come to a consensus by sharing experiences.

Just because your veterinarian's office looks clean and the staff appears friendly is not a sign of a good veterinarian. I worked for a busy, four-doctor practice where the reception staff was always delightful, the veterinarians often receiving special request appointments by their clients, and the technicians were well-trained and very experienced. The most popular veterinarian at this practice was, of course, the owner. Bright and cheerful to a client's face, she would regularly bring feisty pets into the back room for her so-called "Coming to Jesus" speech which once consisted of throwing a cat into a wall.

At a different practice, I saw another veterinarian perform a surgery on an iguana he'd never done before, a foreign body removal, simply because he refused to turn business away. Unfortunately, he had no idea how to operate on reptiles and after removing the foreign object from the iguana's small intestine and suturing it, he neglected to flush the abdominal cavity with warm saline (an essential step for removing free bacteria in the abdomen) which resulted in the reptile dying of sepsis days later. This veterinarian did not learn his lesson as he took on another iguana with a foreign body two, short weeks later. This time he flushed the abdomen with saline and the reptile lived, thrived even, post-operatively, but this doesn't change the fact that someone's beloved pet reptile was first used as a guinea pig.

At this same practice, this veterinarian's colleague and I were positioning a very sick Labrador retriever for a ventral-dorsal view chest radiograph (the dog needed to be positioned on his backside). Labs are very deep chested and often require a foam trough to keep them straight for this radiologic view. This particular veterinary office did not have a trough and the veterinarian and I, each on one end of the lab, struggled to keep the dog in position as he rocked gently from side to side through no fault of his own. Suddenly

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