Corporates & Conferences

Recently I spent some time at a veterinary conference, had a lot of fun, learned a lot of things and came home with a big bag of loot.

I’m in two minds about my bag of loot. On the one hand it’s always nice to receive free stuff as you walk around a hall filled with various stalls trying to sell you stuff (even if most of your free stuff consists of pens and post-it-notes), but on the other hand I try to remain at least a little cynical about all the information I’m given about “wonderful new product X”, particularly when there’s “wonderful new product Y” on the other side of the room.

I know corporate sponsorship is an issue in human medicine and pharmacies, and so I am mindful of it every time I go to work wearing a pair of socks with a particular brand emblazoned on their side, or use a pen with a particular logo on it, or amuse myself with an industry sponsored stress ball or Frisbee.

These events are useful for learning about new products, some of which we genuinely needed, but I am conscious of remaining impartial to brands and only using the one that’s best for the job. To be honest, picking which medication I prescribe sometimes just comes down to the weight of the patient!

But the whole concept of a conference is very useful for re-learning things, discussing difficult cases with somebody new and generally feeling less isolated in this generally fragmented profession.

But it is a bit weird when a ‘normal’ person decides that they get to come to some of our lectures too.

Here’s this thing for all you normal people: If you come to a forum for vets who have spent a whole week discussing a particular topic, don’t be too miffed if you ask what you think is an intelligent, well thought out question only to find you get a very brief or faintly condescending answer. It’s nothing personal, it’s just that we’ve spend the entire week answering that question and in the brief question time we have left we don’t need a fifteen minute response. Honestly, you would have got a better answer to your burning curiosity crusade if you had spent the whole week with us, rather than two hours.

I know it was a hot topic in the media, but if you wanted some sort of closure about what happened to your pet you should have either seen the veterinarian who was there or been here the whole week. I would also like to mention that when you say “How can you claim that, the research hasn’t been done!” you had better be a fully paid up member to the big veterinary journals or you will be missing out on a lot of the research that has been done.

People tend to think that they can spend a few months reading about a topic and it suddenly makes them qualified to argue with experts who have dedicated their lives to that topic. It doesn’t.

So please, don’t be miffed if you didn’t get all the attention or the sort of answer you wanted.

And if you wanted to troll a veterinary forum, stick to the internet.