Could a vet deliver a baby?

[Dogaredabomb]

I'm just pondering the crossover of medical and surgical skills between vets and doctors. I think a vet could do a cesarean in a pinch because they learn about such a wide variety of species.

I'm not pregnant.

Super tough delivery if you're in labour, with only a vet for company and need a bullet removing and a drip sited 🤣🫠

yes i am sure they could - actually if normal pregnancy I do think anyone with commonsense could - everything else being equal
no med conds
hygenic conds

We're cattle people, but I've owned sheep, seen a lot of lambing. I bet your doctor SiL would have appalled to see the swinging of an unresponsive new lamb. I pulled a calf once with a jeep. Cow out on the range, in terrible trouble, no calf puller or chains handy. My husband and I tied baling twine around the calves front feet, tied some to the jeep bumper and I threw it into reverse. Both cow and calf lived.

That's brilliant

She was airlifted out for more investigations, nothing was wrong with her though she was just being a diva 😅

It would be a very interesting chat!

If a cesarean section is required, which from reading the article upthread, is very rare. The gorilla in question was showing signs of pre-eclampsia so baby needed to be out asap

When I was giving birth to my son one summer, my best mate from school (who was home from uni and training as a vet) had a job on the labour and delivery ward as a cleaner. My waters had broken, and they decided I needed a pessary induction.

Friend asked if she could be there up at the business end so she could have a good look. The doctor wondered why the cleaner wanted a ringside seat and when asked I said, “She’s training as a vet & it’s an example of another mammal cervix,” and friend said, “To be honest, we went to an all girls’ school and it was fannies flying everywhere.”

Doc was brilliant, having a good old chat with my mate about different & comparative structures in primates.

She’s a bloody brilliant & successful vet now! The doctor did ask friend if it were true if vets could treat humans but doctors couldn’t treat pets, to which she told him she didn’t know, but give her a pair of gloves & she’d give it a go lol!

Not for general checkups and routine surgery, but for rarer and more complex procedures the benefits of a higher level of specialisation in the surgery can outweigh lack of familiarity with the species. Usually the human-specialist will do the actual scalpel work, with a vet alongside to handle the anaesthesia, positioning, post-op drugs etc.

Mainly for apes, sometimes for monkeys, rarely for non-primates because the anatomy starts to diverge too much for most illnesses. However, for something like a cataract in a tiger there's not too much difference in the front of the eyeball in different large mammals.

You must watch less Monkey Life and read fewer zoo vet autobiographies than I do. It's not common - and has become less so as more vets specialised in exotics, but it does happen.

Up the midline was the standard method on humans until I think the 80s, so it does work.

A, pregnant, vet I know did a scan on herself using equipment at the practice.

I remember joking with a vet friend during Covid that they should get vets in to help with getting everyone vaccinated. I’m sure they’d have got it done faster - if you can vaccinate an uncooperative cat then I’m sure a human is a piece of cake!

Humans do tend to object if you grab them by the scruff of the neck before jabbing.

My local vet sees cats, dogs and occasional rabbits, was stumped with my DSIS’s chicken. Don’t think I’d want them to look at me as a large primate 😂😂😂

The training the non-medical vaccinators had was a power point presentation. (I work in IT for the NHS) was horrified when I found that out.

IMHO they were going out of date and needed using up, quick 😂

I’m sure there will be some that enjoy it 😜

TBH the amount of people now giving themselves weightloss injections taught to them by the paper instructions sent with the jabs, a power point presentation seems a luxury 😂

I remember having to jab myself with fertility drugs in the stomach on a daily basis - the technique I settled on was to get an ice cube out of the freezer and hold it on the spot for 10 seconds to numb the area before sticking the needle in. Only bruised myself occasionally 🤪

Hmm. When a gorilla needed a c-section at Bristol Zoo, 2 senior gynecologists did it, assisted by vets. The gorilla baby was cared for by vets. I mean, I expect a vet would be a good deal more useful in a desperate situation than most people, but still not an ideal choice.

www.theguardian.com/world/2016/feb/23/baby-gorilla-born-caesarean-bristol-zoo-gynaecologist

Mere (human) anaesthetist here & I love looking after vets/vet nurses at work because it’s so interesting comparing notes. Normal human childbirth doesn’t need much in the way of intervention but ‘normal’ childbirth is a retrospective diagnosis and the skill is usually in spotting when it’s starting to go wrong and preventing deterioration/ managing that….most of the time the stakes are a bit higher in humans than animals. And iirc our heads are so disproportionately large and poorly designed for our bipedal pelvises that we’re still more likely to encounter problems than most other mammals (maybe one of the vets on the thread could say if that’s really true or just a myth we get taught). I suspect too that animals at the extremes of normal physiology are less likely to get pregnant whereas humans are pushing the boundaries more and more (there probably aren’t so many animals with significant obesity, congenital heart disease, multiple previous sections, backs full of metalwork, known difficult airways intentionally getting pregnant).

for my own specialty, most sections are done under spinal/epidural where I think most vet sections are GA or more ‘local’ local (although having looked after someone before who did epidurals in cows, perhaps that’s not always true). In humans there’s possibly one of the more nerve wracking risks for us is the higher risk of accidental awareness under GA for a section than for non-obstetric anaesthetics, but with animals you’re probably not going to get complaints of explicit awareness to worry about.

in terms of anatomy, there are some quite significant differences in pelvic/gynae anatomy, evidenced rather beautifully by historical human anatomical texts that extrapolated animal (pig iirc) anatomy to humans and are fascinatingly wrong.

if the apocalypse happened then anyone would (usually!) be better than no one assisting a delivery and a vet would be far more use than someone with no medical training for sure. In an absolute catastrophe more of us have had teaching in doing perimortem sections than you might imagine (I’ve certainly had a bit of teaching on it…..it’d be a bad day indeed if I was the one actually having to do it tho!). Interestingly, a pp mentioned something about psychiatrists being not much use in emergencies….which is probably less true than you’d imagine…they do after all have to look after patients who have severe medical co-morbidities, some pretty punchy medications and often a high risk of harming themselves, often in stand alone units…psych teams quite often have quite a bit of resus training.

Theoretically I could perform a c section on a human but I wouldn't particularly want to! Obviously I'm talking some kind of apocalypse type scenario where the legalities don't apply. I love surgery and I'm pretty good at my day job - much of it is transferable, but unless there was absolutely no other option I'm happy to leave humans to human medics.

I'm pretty much entirely small animal now although I work in a mixed practice - we're all primarily one or the other with a small overlap for a few of us SA vets doing the occasional day covering farm calls or TB tests. I enjoy an occasional calving or cow c section, but wouldn't want to do it all the time. We rarely get exotics in - there's a practice that specialises in exotics about an hour away so most go there.

Can we ponder the meaning of life, instead .....?🤔

Imagine going to Moorfields Eye hospital and overhearing an eye specialist 'ah, anterior diffuse scleritis, yes I often see this in tigers'

Oh, I am sure it works. And it would be the route i would use in the event I found myself having to section a human. She'd better not complain about length of the incision and not being able to hide it under her bikini though!