My friend Julie, who’s been very active in the atheist and skeptical movements, just started vet school this fall. She’s documenting her journey in the best way possible – blogging. I highly suggest you guys go check it out, as she talks about skepticism applied to animal health behavior a lot. I particular like her post on diets, and how vets benefit from skepticism:
I admit, raw was something that sucked me in hard and fast and I was teetering on the edge of true believer status for awhile. I had to reel it in, evaluate the evidence objectively and admit that if I held alternative medicine, faith- and prayer-based medicine, etc. to one standard but not raw diets, I was guilty of biased reasoning and cherry-picking. It’s not something that I tolerate in my colleagues and it’s not something I’ll allow myself to get away with, either.
Check the rest of the post out here.
And if my recommendation isn’t enough for you, Julie is fostering a cat that’s about to give birth. Dozens of kitten photos are imminent. Go, go follow her now!
YAY! THANK YOU for pointing this posting out to me! It let me to SkeptVet, which is also awesome. I’ll be following them both. I’m a part-time dog trainer and have been looking FOREVER for skeptical information source on CAM to point people towards when they ask me about how homeopathy/acupuncture/raw diets could help their dog’s behavior problems. Definitely appreciate it!
Subscribed. And to the SkeptVet, too. I admit that beyond a raised eyebrow or two, I haven’t yet turned a very skeptical eye toward claims being made about animal diet or health. Never really thought about science-based veterinary medicine.This is serendipitous. Just last night I was listening to the Righteous Indignation podcast (ep 86) on which a farmer extolled the benefits of the homeopathic care of his dairy herd — under veterinary supervision. So I got to thinking about the woo that vets might promote. And along comes this post. Thanks!
You had me at “kittens”!
No RSS feed? I admit, that means I’ll never read it, although its definitely something I’d be interested in.
Atom: http://mydvmvacation.blogspot….RSS: http://mydvmvacation.blogspot….
You forgot to plug your own artwork!
What’s an RSS?
See up at the top of the left column on this page where it says “Subscribe to posts/comments”? RSS is the technology behind that (as is Atom, at a basic level the same thing). Plug the URL for the RSS/Atom into something like Google Reader and you can follow updates to the site. Many blogs post direct links to their RSS feed, but many — including yours — also support autodiscovery. This lets me just plug http://mydvmvacation.blogspot…. into Google Reader and it will automatically find the feed, the URL for which is actually http://mydvmvacation.blogspot…..
Oh. Thank you! I’ll try and get one up on my blog later tonight. :)
This is AWESOME. I’ve been debating on what food to feed my dogs for a while, but there’s so much contradictory information out there (raw is best, no it isn’t, grains are good, no they’re not) it’s enough to make your head spin.