Take Your Animals To Ohio State...

If you have a serious issue with your pet or other animal and

• it can wait
• you are close enough
• it's a covered species

please consider taking your animal to Ohio State University's (OSU's) Veterinary Medical Center or a satellite office. See https://vmc.vet.osu.edu/ for more info on locations for companion animals, horses, and farm animals.

I am much closer to Michigan State University (MSU), but my experiences there over the years finally reached the point where I can no longer trust them.

My experiences at OSU were FAR superior in information from them, their listening to me, their responsiveness to calls and email (often ~1 hr turnaround on the latter), their clarity of vision with respect to why a given course of treatment would be followed, availability both pre- and post-surgery, and even in pricing.

I have to recommend NOT using MSU for being on the other side of these issues.

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TheeRoyalBee · 31-35, F

Thank you for telling us this. I wish I known about this last year.

SomeMichGuy · M

@TheeRoyalBee Oh no...I'm sorry you had an issue with a pet. 🥺

TheeRoyalBee · 31-35, F

@SomeMichGuy it was really bad and I went to a few veterinarian specialists. Couldn’t really diagnose it.baffled I still think about it

SomeMichGuy · M

@TheeRoyalBee I'm sorry. The university programs tend to have "referral hospitals": you get referred there by your pet's vet, with records being forwarded.

The strengths of these programs are several:

1) They see low-probability things ALL the time, whereas your local vet might NEVER see the given condition.

I had exactly that occur when a dog had a Ca problem: MSU sees it every week, many vets will never see the cause which my dog had (tumor on a parathyroid). Most vets would tell you it's cancer and not be able to diagnose what is going on, so there are likely many dogs euthanized who did not need that...

(The dog lived ~twice as long because I noticed a tiny shaking.)

2) If something is happening and you are being seen by one department, but another is implicated in your pet's diagnosis or treatment, they can pull in these other professionals as needed in order to figure out what is going on with your pet or help him/her.

This is a HUGE advantage of a large veterinary medical center, rather than a tiny "animal hospital", which might ha e specialists through on a rotating basis, rather than having all specialties housed on-site.

CAVEAT: One of my issues with MSU is that the ENTIRE ophthalmology department was gone to a convention in TX for a week. During that time, eye problems were NOT being seen in-house, as far as my experience showed. [i]The director of the hospital also told me that other departments did the same thing.[/i]