In this episode of the Cone of Shame Veterinary Podcast, Dr. Andy Roark is joined by Dr. Emily Tincher, Chief Veterinary Officer at Nationwide Pet Insurance, to explore how veterinarians can personalize care for individual pets, their families and to the disease. They discuss new research, tools like The Pet HealthZone®, and the power of clinical empathy. According to recent PetSmart Charities research, nearly half of pet families are questioning whether care is worth the cost. This episode dives into practical ways to keep care accessible, affordable, and aligned with clients’ goals and realities. They explore how personalizing care goes beyond cost. It’s about matching treatment to what the pet family can realistically do, whether that’s giving medications, handling mobility, or managing emotional stress. This conversation is packed with actionable ideas for any veterinary healthcare team in the exam room!
This episode is brought to you by Nationwide Pet Insurance!
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LINKS
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52% of U.S. Pet Owners Have Skipped or Declined Recommended Veterinary Care | PetSmart Charities
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ABOUT OUR GUEST
Dr. Emily M. Tincher is a collaborative leader who uses data-informed approaches to create sustainable systems that meet the needs of pet families, veterinary healthcare teams, and businesses. She is a second-generation veterinarian and a graduate of Auburn University’s College of Veterinary Medicine, and she has worked in industry roles and in small animal emergency and general practices. As Chief Veterinary Officer at Nationwide, Dr. Tincher manages strategy and operations for pet health programs, develops partnerships within the animal health industry, and directs engagement with veterinary teams.
Dr. Tincher is President of the Board of Directors for the Veterinary Leadership Institute and is a member of the Board of Directors of the Veterinary Innovation Council. She co-authored a chapter in Veterinary Clinics of North America: Small Animal Practice, “Cost of Care, Access to Care, and Payment Options in Veterinary Practice,” and has become a sought-after speaker, most recently on spectrum of care topics, presenting at major veterinary conferences across North America.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Dr. Andy Roark: Welcome everybody to the Cone of Shame Veterinary podcast. I am your host, Dr. Andy. I got a great one here today with my good friend, Dr. Emily Tincher. She is the Chief Veterinary Officer at Nationwide Pet Insurance, and we are talking about personalizing care. Emily is a huge advocate for spectrum of care and keeping care accessible and affordable for pet owners.
And we start talking about what that really looks like. And in this episode we get into personalizing our care recommendations around individual pets, around individual families, and then around individual conditions of diseases. anyway, this is a great overview of kind of where we are with spectrum of care and accessibility to care.
it’s a good conversation for anybody who’s working the exam room and anybody who really wants to make sure that. Pet owners continue to have access to care. we talk a bit about some new research from PetSmart Charities around how pet owners feel about the care they’re being offered and recommended and also what pet owners are able to do to provide lifesaving care.
So anyway, that’s where we are. I think you guys are gonna really enjoy this episode. It is brought to you ad free by Nationwide Pet Insurance. Guys, let’s get into it.
Kelsey Beth Carpenter: This is your show. We’re glad you’re here. We want to help you in your veterinary career. Welcome to the Cone of Shame with Dr. Andy Roark.
Dr. Andy Roark: Welcome to the podcast Dr. Emily Tincher. How are you, my friend?
Dr. Emily Tincher: I am doing excellent. Thanks so much for having me back.
Dr. Andy Roark: I love having you back. I have thought about the last time you were here and you were on my mind. Last week when I was in the vet clinic last week, when I was in the vet clinic, I had a cat. I. Who came in was an allergy cat.
He was kind of wheezing and he was sort of snotty and things like that. And I went in to see the owners and I had seen them before and they’re interesting because the actual cat’s owner was there and she was probably 90 years old. I. And she was probably nine years old and her daughter was there. Of course, her daughter is 73.
You know, like it’s they’re, they’re just, they’re, it is very multi-generational, but yes. but that was the pair of them is like 70-year-old daughter. The 90-year-old mom and, and the, and the cat. And we got down to the treatment plan or treatment, part of the visit. And Emily, the defining feature of this visit was not, how much money do they have or what are they willing to spend?
Dr. Emily Tincher: Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Roark: It really was. What are they able to actually do with this cat? And we had to talk about who
Dr. Emily Tincher: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark: is available, what is our dexterity like, what is your cat’s tolerance for being messed with going to be
Dr. Emily Tincher: at home.
Mm-hmm.
Dr. Andy Roark: And, and just, and, and also, you know, mom has got really thin skin. And that was brought up as, you know, if you get scratched, it’s a big deal.
Dr. Emily Tincher: It’s a problem. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark: I was glad to be there. I was glad to be supportive. I think we came out with a treatment plan that was a good starting place. Everybody felt safe. I felt safe and we’re gonna work off of it, but it, reminded me of, your last visit, and we talked a lot about. What spectrum of care really looks like and how that can be, what is possible and have nothing to do with money, but what is possible as far as actually delivering care. So you’ve been in my thoughts and I just, I feel richer after our conversation, so thank you for that. I just wanna start out by saying that.
Dr. Emily Tincher: Thank you for sharing that story. That’s a really interesting, we’ll get into this in a little bit, but PetSmart Charities just shared some awesome new data from a pretty extensive survey they did with Gallup. One of the things that they released was that 46% of pet owners. Who had turned down care were not given a treatment plan that better fit their pet’s practical needs.
I feel like that fits into that category of almost one in two pets that may not get the care they need that’s recommended because we don’t always give them that more practical implementable treatment plan that works for the family. That’s what a tangible, great result. And thank you for sharing that.
Dr. Andy Roark: No, it is. I, these are the types of things we talk about. I wanna talk about what an implementable plan looks like for you. When we got on, I was asking, it was like, what you’ve been up to and you shared with me that you’re prepping for the Veterinary Leadership Experience. For those of you who are not familiar with VLE you should take a look at it. It has actually, I’ll just, I’ll let you say what the VLE is. Why don’t you give us a high level overview.
Dr. Emily Tincher: it is a nonprofit organization that I’m on the board of directors for that the goal is to help. Each individual in VLE is very focused on students and clinicians. We ha we do have a separate event that’s focused on veterinarians, technicians, and practice managers for race ce.
But our entire mission is to help individuals in veterinary medicine be their best selves through leadership and professional and communication skills and that kind of almost power of 10 type experience of lead yourself well and go back and lead your communities and your practices and your organizations and ultimately our entire vet med community well by doing investing in ourselves and doing the work that we need to, enhance our emotional intelligence, our communication skills, and really excited about VLE coming up.
We have a really great group of students from most of the vet schools across the US as well as clinicians that are coming to join us and invest in that experiential education.
Dr. Andy Roark: You were talking about VLE when you came on and getting prepped for that.
Dr. Emily Tincher: Yes, and I’ve issued a challenge for us. So my co-facilitator shout out to Dr. Theo Langa we are doing an activity tonight to just get to know each other a little bit better in preparation for this event. And together we’ll be facilitating a small group and they said, Hey, let’s do this activity.
And I’ve chosen one thing and you’ve chosen one thing that’s part of that activity is share something, a thing that you have in your home that is related to you speaks to who you are, your journey in Vet Med and tell a little story. Share your thing and tell a little story about that.
Dr. Andy Roark: I, failed the assignment of picking one thing. I so I have two. I have two things. I have two things. Do you want, the more professional thing or the more like personal thing?
Dr. Emily Tincher: Oh gosh. I want the more personal thing for sure.
Dr. Andy Roark: All right. Hold on. I’m gonna, I have to, I’m gonna grab it. The more personal thing. It’s right. right here. It is this
Dr. Emily Tincher: Oh,
Dr. Andy Roark: it’s this knit octopus that my daughter, Hannah made for me with her own two little hands. And
Dr. Emily Tincher: That’s so cute.
Dr. Andy Roark: Um, Yeah, she was like 12 years old when she made this. And yeah, we had been on vacation and. We were at the beach and I talked about my favorite animal was an octopus and she listened to that. And so for Christmas, I got this handmade octopus. It’s as big as my head. It’s not a small octopus. And yeah, that was, that’s probably my, I put it in my Dr. Andy Roark studio. It sits one of the shelves and it looks kind of veterinarian-y because it is an animal and you can see the tentacles, but se but secretly, it’s all about, it’s all about my daughter.
Dr. Emily Tincher: It’s connecting you to your family and bringing you some joy throughout the day. I love that.
Dr. Andy Roark: Absolutely. Every time I look at it, it makes me happy. What did you, bring?
Dr. Emily Tincher: I, brought a, slightly more work focused one professional focus one I guess I should say. So I brought a little key chain.
Dr. Andy Roark: Oh
Dr. Emily Tincher: and it, says, for those who can’t see it, it’s nationwide branded and. Blue and it says more care for more pets. And this is the result of a lot of work actually to get, to, get to, to distill down what it is that you’re trying to do.
And, the, years of work in the space of providing a spectrum of care. How do we meet pet families with their, where they are, with their regard to their goals, their values, their resources, and where nationwide comes in their, finances especially. that teeny little slogan there is it’s the result of many hours of work with my colleague, Dr. Jules Benson and, previous Chief Veterinary Officer and our pet health team to come up with that. And so every time I see it, I think of the people and of the collaborative team it takes to come up with something like that. And I think of our purpose and why we do the work that we do.
It has my mail key on it, so I do happen to like, you know, see it now and then, but yeah, just, I, hadn’t looked at it with a critical eye in a little while. Unlike your adorable octopus that’s sitting in your office, it just sits, you know, on my key ring. But the prompt from Theo helped me to just reflect a little bit actively.
Dr. Andy Roark: It’s a sad nature of the human experience is that it doesn’t matter how valuable things are. they fade into the background over time. You know? I do notice my octopus sometimes, but a lot of times, you know what I mean? At the same time, it’s just your, it’s just your office and at the same time,
Dr. Emily Tincher: Yeah. We habituate.
Dr. Andy Roark: You know, there’s that old motivational speaker named Zig Ziglar, and he had this saying, he was like, motivation is like showering. You have to keep doing it. And, and it’s true. It’s Yeah.
We talk so much in the, in, in our profession about, purpose and meaning, and I find those things to be deeply like motivating and powerful.
I really love the vet profession. I really love the fact that we get to make a difference and do good in the world. It’s sad that we all have to keep being reminded of that. And over time, like you, you lose sight of that. The irritations are, they their attention grabbing?
Dr. Emily Tincher: Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark: You’re always aware of what’s irritating you,
Dr. Emily Tincher: They’re keeping you sharp. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark: Exactly right but the purpose is the key ring that you just become blind to over time. And so anyway, I love the exercise as far as just making like. That octopus been sitting in my office and I just, you know, I don’t, it’s not top of mind for me said, look around and find something that’s meaningful. And I go, oh, yes, that’s meaningful. And then it made me have this sort of you know, nostalgic journey. It sort of brings that back. But I think a lot of the work that you do with nationwide around spectrum of care is really, I think it’s really effective because it does tap back into the meaning and the purpose that I think a lot of us feel as we got the profession.
But you just lose that, you get tired of people running late and you get tired of people who are having a bad day or they’re upset about what things cost and and the dogs are heavy and my back hurts. And, all of those things are, very acute. And so I, just, I, love sort of the call out of the deeper purpose.
And I think, figuring out how to keep reminding people of what matters in the work
Dr. Emily Tincher: and reminding ourselves like, I, I need it. I am like, I’m like, gosh, I, I really appreciate that activity and wanna challenge our listeners today to like, if you don’t listen to anything else, try that with your team. What is one thing I love, we’re gonna do 10 things this afternoon, but like one thing has really, it was a good reflective moment for me, so yeah. Thank you for doing that with me.
Dr. Andy Roark: No, that’s fantastic. You, had mentioned, you were like, I have a thing I wanna try. I was like, great. We’ll, we will, we’ll start off with, so outstanding. Well, let’s, let’s go back to the, let’s go back to the PetSmart Charities sort of data and sort of jump back in to what we were talking about before as far as and purpose and, then sort of accessibility of care. And so talk, to me a little bit about how when you start to look at data like this, what are you sort of seeing in the larger context of spectrum of care that you’ve been talking about?
Dr. Emily Tincher: We’ll link to this in the show notes , it was posted. Pet Smart Charities has been working on this for a little bit, I believe they surveyed a little over 2,500 pet families across the US and tried really hard to get a representative sample, including even doing things like mail in responses to make sure they found some folks that maybe don’t have access to internet. So, I wanna call out the method because I think they, they did a really great job looking for sample size and bias posted in mid-April.
And one of the things, there’s just one area that really stood out to me as. It’s always helpful to characterize, I think, better. Where are we seeing the pain points? And I’ll start out by saying probably something that’s not gonna surprise most of us, that cost of care showed up as a big challenge for pet families.
And, as we look at the highlight of that, they have even as folks get into a higher socioeconomic range, so like household income, one in three PET parents with an annual income of at least $90,000. So like a higher income level here who have not brought their pet to the vet or who declined recommended care.
Say they skipped it because they could not afford it. And I think that’s what’s interesting there is it’s a higher number as you get to a lower household income, which is probably not surprising to us. But it’s not limits and challenges affording pet care and veterinary care right now are absolutely not constrained to lower household income levels.
So I think that’s one really great piece to call out, especially as we go this data was collected I think at the end of end of which was maybe January of 2025, we’re going into maybe even a time of even more economic uncertainty right now. So I, don’t necessarily expect that to get better.
Dr. Andy Roark: I was talking to a veterinarian that works in Coronado, California one time. Do you know where Coronado is?
Dr. Emily Tincher: No, I don’t.
Dr. Andy Roark: It is like swanky beach, like super posh, California.
Dr. Emily Tincher: Okay.
Dr. Andy Roark: And I was asking him about sort of biggest headaches and he was like, man, people don’t have any money. And I said to him, I was like, you’re in Coronado, California.
This is like the, wealthiest zip code, in America. And he said, no, no, It has the biggest houses. in America. He was like everyone is house poor. He was like they are all, they all spent their money on their house. I was like, no one has any money according to them. No one has money left to spend. And again, I don’t know how true that was, but the idea that the vet in this wildly wealthy little island in California is like, nobody has any money. That was the first time I ran into the idea that you can go to really wealthy areas and you are still gonna run into financial hardship challengesor unwillingness or inability to pay for care.
Dr. Emily Tincher: I think that last component there is really interesting too, and this is the piece of the PetSmart charity data that I haven’t necessarily seen in other places where they found a pretty high percentage pet families also responded that care was not worth the cost.
And as households went up in household income, the amount that could not afford the care that went down, but the amount that said that. Actually once you get to 60,000 and above for household income, it’s 42 to 44% of the time pet families said they did not think care was worth the cost, which I think is really interesting from a what are the things that we can do to message better, to communicate better to personalize care?
So I’m like, well, that’s, that’s an incredible data. Almost one in two pet families responded that they did not think that care was worth the cost. And so I’m thinking, gosh, we probably can’t get that to zero and there, there’s so many pieces to that, right? Cultural and educational and communication and it doesn’t tell us the exact why, but there are some things I think we could do to influence that.
Dr. Andy Roark: I agree with that and I wish, God, I wish I knew more of the context of that, you know what I mean? Like, when we say it’s not worth the cost, I’m like, what does that mean? And what is what care are we talking about? Are these people saying I’ll just get another cat? Like, I hope that’s not what they’re saying, or are they saying, yeah. I could pay for a joint supplement, but the benefits I think I’m going to see versus the cost of this ongoing treatment doesn’t Like that context really, really matters a lot.
Dr. Emily Tincher: It does matter and I’ll encourage anyone interested in diving into that extra context to go and, look at the rest of the report. It about one in four people report having received information about financial options. And so I think there’s a lot of a mix to that of you know, am I gonna be a financial hardship for this?
I think there are, there, we already talked about there being a high percent of pet families that felt like they weren’t given a practical treatment plan for them and their pet. And so there is some extra context in there to glean from some additional questions while it, you know, every family is a little bit different as we know from sitting in exam rooms and, having those conversations.
So, yeah, I thought it was really interesting kind of way into how do we personalize care for people and do that and hopefully in a as efficient, you know, one of the things we’d like to talk about is we don’t have hour long appointments most of the time some people do. But most of the time we don’t have that.
So how can we personalize care in as in, in our conversations surrounding it and as a effective and efficient way as possible.
Dr. Andy Roark: Emily, do you think that there’s a way to sort of systematize parts of this conversation around sort the practical treatment plan is, the phrase that sticks out in my mind is like, what the heck is a practical treatment plan?
Dr. Emily Tincher: Yeah,
Dr. Andy Roark: It totally depends on who you are and what your situation is.
Dr. Emily Tincher: One hundred percent.
Dr. Andy Roark: Are there, yeah, are there efficient, effective ways to try to systematize our collection of that kind of information? I don’t know.
Dr. Emily Tincher: Yeah.
What
Dr. Andy Roark: do you think about that? Or do you think it’s all in entirely inside of the relationship, in the exam room? What’s your perspective?
Dr. Emily Tincher: I think probably a mix to those things. One of the great parts about our profession and why we’ll be spending so much time on communication and emotional intelligence at VLE is that there is some personalization and some of that comes through the relationship building, either in the exam room or over time.
But I do think there are things that we can do outside of the exam room or delegate to different people to do within our practices. And so I think I have like three main things to think about and that’s personalizing to the pet, that’s personalizing to the pet family and that’s some communication pieces, and then personalizing a little bit to the disease, which kind of gets it, both of those things. So personalizing to the pet I do think can be done. Some what in advance. And so, we’ve talked about a tool that we have free of charge at, developed at Nationwide called the Pet Health Zone. And one of the ways that we see practices using this tool that provides, among other things risk-based assessments based on a lot of claims data from care that’s provided by veterinarians all across the US is we have risk-based health data. And so I’ve pulled up from my dog Sprout, who is a one-year-old male, neutered, medium size 35 pound dog. I’ve pulled up what are his top risks based on our claims data. And I can say they are spot on from his, lifestyle of one skin allergies which he does not appear to have thankfully. But it is our most common claim for dogs 13 years running. So pretty good likelihood for any dog foreign body ingestion. He doesn’t eat things yet, but he does love to chew things up if he is unsupervised for five minutes or toxicities, which tend to go with that.
Now, that’s a mixed breed dog. and that is life stage based. And one of the ways that we’ve seen practices use that from a both cost of care and preparation component is we have estimated costs for treatment of these things based on real claims data. And we also have that targeted approach.
People really are looking for personalized value to, okay, if you’re asking me to do something different at home or with my pet or with perhaps a diagnostic recommendation. Can you help me understand that? It might be that my particular pet is at a higher risk than you know, the, dog next door, so that I know that it feels like you’ve thought about my pet individually and taken that into account, and I don’t know all of these things as a veterinarian off the top of my head. So a tool to send them in advance so they can ask you better questions has, is helpful sometimes.
Dr. Andy Roark: I like that. I, remember there was data that came out. It’s been couple now, but it was on, I think it was through Dr. Jason Co e put it together, but thing that, that I was surprised by was they looked at what recommendations were effective when talking to pet owners and what they found was that veterinarian saying, this is what I do for my dog, was not as persuasive as we have historically thought. And what they found instead was that making a recommendation for this specific patient and explaining why specific cat, your specific dog should have this specific diet, that was the most effective way to sort of go forward. And that was the first time for me that I started to think more and more about like, oh yeah, I think, I think starting to speak in specifics about why this pet in the room is, right for this specific plan. That was the first time that really dawned on me of like, yeah, there’s probably a better way speaking in generalities and what we as veterinarians are personally excited about.
Dr. Emily Tincher: Yeah, I, and the relationship centered care team with Dr. Coe at Guelph, they do some really amazing communications research. So if you are a communications nerd as we are, and you want to dive in. They’re a great place, a great follow on LinkedIn as they post their, publications there, and we can link to the pet health zone in the show notes as well. And then let’s talk about personalizing to the pet family. And we’ve talked about clinical empathy before this. It is like the superpower of understanding and asking about pet family goals, values, and resources. It is empathizing verbally out saying, I, I have heard you in some type of way so that pet families know that we are listening and then it’s doing something different.
And that’s the clinical component based on, and your cat story is such a cool example of that, of like, well, I had a plan and then we discussed that plan probably wasn’t feasible for the pet family in front of me. And so I, we altered that so that we had something that made sense for everybody and was safe physically for everybody. And so that is such a great example of how to employ that. How do we do that efficiently and effectively? I think in this type of setting of, we’ve talked a little bit about pet factors or family factors. We’re really recommending doing that in the history. In a, sometimes in a, if you have a, pre exam form that’s great for wellness visits, a lot of places still are not doing that, especially for sick visits.
So including that with either your assistant or your technician to say, Hey, is there anything that we should know about that’s going on or might affect like your treat the treatment plan or things that you’re able to do, give medications at home and. Sometimes the answer will be no. Or sometimes they’ll be thinking about it.
You know that every time we as a doctor walk in and they have an extra thing that they’ve thought of giving, them that five minutes or whatever between does allow them to think, well, yeah, I do actually have you know, a vacation coming up. And so I. What, what does it look like to, give medications three times a day when boarding the dog or a pet sitter is not gonna be there that often, you know, that personalization can happen and it can help us reach that plan that makes sense for everyone.
But we, talk, as we talked about before, how many times do we just never know that, that skipped past us? how many times with the, PetSmart Charities data did we just. Never offer that additional option. And pet families don’t always speak up.
Dr. Andy Roark: Sure. That like, it’s incredible to me how many people will take the medication home and just be like, this is not gonna happen.
Dr. Emily Tincher: Yeah. Yeah. And that’s not helping anyone, right?
Dr. Andy Roark: That’s just, Well, I think a, I think a lot of people are conflict avoidant and you know, they just not comfortable saying to you.
Dr. Emily Tincher: They feel awkward.
Dr. Andy Roark: It is awkward to say, I can’t do this. This thing that you are taking for granted or acting like it’s easy to do. I can’t do it. It’s a humbling experience. So I, mean, I get it. It’s one of those things again that we can easily in the hustle and bustle sort of lose sight of during the day. Talk to to me a little about the disease centered care.
Dr. Emily Tincher: Yeah. So the last component that I wanna talk about is how do we personalize to the disease? And some of that is, you know, the using the available evidence-based medicine that we have to tailor treatment options. And because specifically one of the questions again that, PetSmart Charities asked was the amount of money pet owners could afford to spend on lifesaving care for their pet. Do you have any rough as like guesses? I know I didn’t send it to you in advance and it’s just come out so
Dr. Andy Roark: No, honestly I saw this come out and I, but it just came out when we’re recording it, and I’ll be honest to say that I have not looked at it. And so I will say without looking at anything, I’m gonna say the average American family has $300 in savings in their account, and I suspect they could pull together more than that and the amount that they could get together for lifesaving care was what you asked me
Dr. Emily Tincher: Life saving care. Yeah.
Dr. Andy Roark: Yeah. Is it $750?
Dr. Emily Tincher: It’s a, it was a, little bit more than that up but pretty close, especially with their cutoffs. They had a $500 option and then they had a thousand dollars option, so about two thirds of pet owners, or 66% said that they would be able to do a thousand dollars or less. Which is great, but I just wanna call out as we’re going the disease we are gonna talk about is a sometimes surgical component. In this particular, the example that we’re gonna give is, a foreign body. We’re gonna stick with Sprout, my 1-year-old mix for, and then things that he’s at risk for. Many times at right now, especially at specialty and referral, we are seeing costs of eight to $10,000, sometimes more for emergency surgeries. And they did ask up to $10,000 or more than $10,000 and it got around 10% of pet families said that they could do that for life saving care. And so, gets, that’s a pretty small percent of the population at that point that can afford care like that you know, if their pet, you know, isn’t insured to, to help with some of those things. And so I wanna share a really cool study that came out this year that is the looking at outcomes for outpatient gi foreign body surgery and ultimate, and this is where the theme of the day, we can share for more info in the show notes, but, notes.
It is a JAVMA study by Eric Smith Etal, where they found that survival rate was very similar for outpatient foreign body surgery to hospitalized inpatient surgery. So, And they had, it was about a 95% survival rate for pets who were discharged. That doesn’t include the ones that were euthanized on the table.
And they looked at just over a hundred dogs and about 40 cats. So, decent sample size for, for what we get in vet med. And just an interesting, as we look at how do we personalize care, make sure people understand what their options are, and the absolute best chance of having a great outcome.
Also if we’re tailoring care and, you know, going to have the emergency surgery for the foreign body that I hope I’m not, knock on wood wishing on Sprout ever. it’s nice to know when there is some evidence base to support different levels of care and I thought this was a, really great practical study that highlighted we can do a lot in, a general practice setting.
Dr. Andy Roark: Well, I remember the first time I saw you speaking on outpatient parvo care and you were just talking about how, you know, how successful outpatient care for parvovirus can be, and it’s one of those things. That’s when the first time I was really sitting and thinking I. I wish that people were more aware of this and like be more aware of it. I really do think that treatments and therapies that push the standard of care higher, I think they get a lot of attention. I think practically the treatment approaches that are not the gold standard of care, but are much more accessible that actually work.I wish that we got more spotlight on those things.
I think they’re so useful in the exam room. I think it’s what people really want to know. I hate the idea that I would make a call that would, be super expensive for a pet owner, and there was a viable alternative that I just didn’t know about. And I didn’t say it because I was trying to do what was right for the pet.
And so when you report things like this and we talk about ’em, I’m glad that you keep sort of raising awareness of, those approaches. But I think that this is the type of medicine that we all should be becoming more and more aware of is.
What is the gold standard, but then also what are the places where conservative treatment or conservative management really can be quite successful versus the place where you say conservative management is going to be a bad move and you should advocate strongly for more aggressive approaches.
Dr. Emily Tincher: Absolutely.
Dr. Andy Roark: It’s a real education opportunity I think for, vet professionals.
Yeah, I think there’s that, twofold component of, one, we need more evidence-based studies. We need more evidence-based medicine that’s beyond our personal experience to help us feel comfortable doing that outpatient surgery or doing the outpatient Colorado State parvo protocol. You know, having the outcomes research to, to feel more confident, recommending that is absolutely helpful.
And sometimes we don’t see it as much in the mainstream, so it really does feel like The two pieces of more research is needed and huge shout out to places like the A-S-P-C-A, this, this paper was also a collaboration with Colorado State and Humane Colorado. So I, think there are some areas that are, doing some of that work and, funding some of that research.
But we do need more of it, I think, to be able to confidently say where are those places where great intermediate level care or, you know, general practice level care can really serve our clientele well. And where are the places where we probably should lean on, referring with that, you know, in this case, a septic abdomen probably needs to go the ICU type thing.
Dr. Emily Tincher, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for talking through this with me. Good luck at VLE, by the way, where can people find you online? You keep an active LinkedIn presence. Where else can people see what you’re up to?
Dr. Emily Tincher: You can absolutely follow me on LinkedIn. I’m intermittently active there and excited to interact with y’all and hear what anyone else is doing from a personalization for people, pets, and diseases.
Dr. Andy Roark: Outstanding. Well, thanks Emily. Guys, thanks for being here everybody. Take care of yourself, gang. We’ll talk to you later.
And that’s what I got guys. Thanks for being here. Thanks again to Nationwide Pet Insurance for making this episode possible. Thanks to Emily for being here and sharing her knowledge. Gang, take care of yourselves, everybody. I’ll talk to you later on.
