A side-trip to impostor syndrome

There seems to be a disconnect between human and veterinary medicine, at least in public discourse.  For sure, human and veterinary medicine are not identical, if only because every species has anatomy and physiology that makes them their own species.  And it irks me when, for example, physicians for humans make informal recommendations in public dog-discourse based on what they know about drug action/affects in humans.

As an epidemiologist, I have been trained to evaluate reports of health/medical studies for biases that may hide the true relationship between a disease and an exposure.  I am perfect at it, but I have more training in evaluating sound medical science than the average person.  And I have always felt that this training carried over into veterinary medicine.  The features of a high quality study remain the same whether the subjects are human or canine!  If anything, there are a lot of parallels between canine epidemiology and pediatric epidemiology (especially in babies/toddlers): both dogs and toddlers rely entirely on their caregivers to meet their physical and emotional needs, to teach them how the world works, and make appropriate health decisions with their best interests at heart.  In addition to all of the biases that normally come along with observational studies, both pediatric and veterinary health studies are prone to placebo-effect affecting the caregiver.

There are very few reasons why my training in evaluating human literature should not apply to veterinary literature as well.  I am not an expert in human physiology or anatomy either; lack of expertise in veterinary physiology/anatomy is not the difference here.  In fact, I have more training in animal physiology/anatomy than the human equivalents.

Despite my internal inadequacies, it was really nice to get some validation in this area.  It came in the form of summary notes from a workshop put on by one of the biggest names in veterinary behaviour (that I wish I had attended, but that's another story).  It was nice to see that we had the same conclusions in a lot of behavioural treatments, based on the evidence in the literature.  And it was a good reminder to myself that hey, even if I don't feel like I know what I'm doing, and even if random internet people who don't know my qualifications tell me I'm not qualified because I'm not a vet*, it doesn't matter.  I'm not out to lunch on this stuff - the training holds true.

*Vets are really great professionals and I have a lot of respect for them, but - like human physicians - the focus of their training is on diagnosing and treating disease, not designing studies or evaluating study methodologies.  But that is a rant for another time.