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In Part 3  of this series, I want to explore: How corporate sponsorship can quietly narrow  the spectrum of care, and   How an outcome-focused CPD system can help us reopen  it. Picture this. You’re at a major conference, in a standing-room-only session on chronic enteropathy in dogs. The speaker is excellent, the slides are polished, and the diagnostic workup on each case includes: full lab panel, abdominal ultrasound, GI panel, endoscopy with biopsies, and long-term branded

Facts about India are plentiful. Useful facts are earned. This piece is not about superlatives or trivia. It is about what makes the difference between merely getting through  India and truly experiencing it. Much of what follows comes from personal experience - mistakes made once, sometimes twice, but never again. Think of this as practical wisdom. India Is a Continent Masquerading as a Country India’s scale defies intuition. Distances are vast. Cultures shift dramatically

One of my favorite things to do in India is street photography. Its unlike anywhere else in the world. Colors that don’t merely decorate the scene but structure  it. Saffron, vermilion, indigo, turmeric, dust, rust, sunlight. In India, color is not esthetic garnish. It is language. It signals devotion, work, caste, celebration, grief, season, intention. For a photographer, it is irresistible. But India is not a place where you simply take  photographs. It is a place where you

People rarely speak of grace when they first leave India. They speak of exhaustion. Of noise. Of heat, crowds, delays, things that did not work the way they were supposed to. They speak of how difficult it was. How relentless. How unlike anywhere else. And then, quietly, often weeks or months later, something shifts. Grace arrives late. What Remains When the Hard Parts Fade The discomfort fades first. The frustration loosens its grip. What remains are moments so small they al

India does not meet you halfway. This is the point in the journey where many travelers stiffen. Where carefully learned rules about food, water, family, and faith collide with something less containable. Noise rises. Crowds thicken. Plans dissolve. Systems you rely on - time, order, efficiency - begin to wobble. India pushes back hardest here, not out of hostility, but indifference. Time as a Suggestion In India, time is elastic. Trains arrive when they arrive. Meetings begin

In India, faith does not lower its voice. It rings bells before dawn. It burns incense at street corners. It spills into traffic and interrupts schedules without apology. Here, belief is not something you carry discreetly. It is something you live visibly, publicly, and often without explanation. To the visitor, this can at first feel overwhelming. And then, slowly, it feels instructive. A Majority Faith That Isn’t Quiet Hinduism is not just one belief system among many in In

In India, you are not hosted. You are absorbed. There is a subtle but important difference: Hosting  implies a boundary: a start time, an end time, a sense that you will eventually leave and life will resume its usual shape.   Absorption  has no such courtesy. Once you cross the threshold of an Indian home, you are inside the organism. You are family now. Whether you asked to be or not. The Guest Is God The phrase Atithi Devo Bhava - the guest is God  - is often translated p

You can admire food from a distance. You cannot do that with water. Water enters you quietly. It slips past intention and habit, past years of unthinking trust. In India, water is never neutral. It is watched, boiled, filtered, carried, bartered, worshiped, feared. It is life - and it is risk. You learn this not from a warning sign, but from the pause before you brush your teeth. Water Is Everywhere & It’s Rarely Innocent In much of the world, water is invisible infrastructur

Before you travel in India, you must learn how  to eat. Not what  to eat - that comes later - but how . Slowly. Deliberately. With respect. With restraint. And with an understanding that food in India is not merely nourishment, but culture, religion, family, and ritual layered onto a plate. India teaches this lesson early. Sometimes forcefully. The First Truth: India Is Generous With Food Food in India is everywhere. It arrives uninvited. It is pressed upon you. It is shared

In Part 1 , I argued that we need to bring the same level of scrutiny to veterinary continuing education (CE) that human medicine has applied to its own system, especially around corporate influence. But even if we solved the funding problem tomorrow, we’d still be left with a deeper issue: Our regulatory systems treat time spent in a chair as a proxy for competence. Even if a participant sleeps through all the lectures! You know the drill: I need 20 hours this year.   I’m sh

Picture two wolves in the veterinary profession. One is Greed . Not always snarling, often well-dressed. It speaks in polished phrases: efficiency , synergy , standardization , scale , shareholder value . It doesn’t announce itself as predation. It arrives as a spreadsheet. The other is   Care . The old, stubborn animal in us. Compassion , craft , continuity . A vet who knows the patient, the client, the staff member’s kid’s name, the way a frightened dog leans into a particu

We drove into Van Horn, Texas,  as we have done once a year for the past eleven years and sat down for dinner in the dining room of the El Capitan Hotel . Built in 1930, El Capitan still carries itself with the quiet dignity of another era. The food is excellent, the wine list carefully chosen, the service warm and unhurried. For us, the El Capitan has become a ritual. Proof that some things endure when care, community, and craftsmanship are valued. Just north of this little

One of the more curious rebuttals to any critique of corporate influence in veterinary medicine is the phrase: You’ve never worked in a corporate practice, so your opinion doesn’t count. It’s a silencing tactic. A way of shrinking the conversation to those already within the system, and by extension, ensuring that dissenting voices remain unheard. But this argument collapses under the simplest scrutiny. You don’t need to have drawn a corporate paycheck to understand the ethic

In the high desert of New Mexico, where sunlight paints the mesas in gold and red, a simple yet powerful image radiates across the landscape. The Zia Sun Symbol . To many, The symbol is instantly recognizable from the New Mexico state flag: a red sun with four groups of four rays extending outward on a golden field. But to the Zia Pueblo , this symbol carries a far deeper meaning rooted in spirituality, harmony, and respect for the natural order of life. Origins in the Zia Pu

In veterinary medicine, ownership has long implied responsibility. To call a hospital privately owned once meant that veterinarians - those directly accountable to patients and clients - owned and governed their own workplaces. The phrase carried a sense of professional integrity and continuity. Clients could trust that decisions about their pets were guided by clinicians, not by external investors. Today, the meaning of those words has shifted. To illustrate this point, I w

I went to Istanbul to talk about old dogs’ brains and came home thinking mostly about cats. Back in May 2002, Hill’s Pet Nutrition put together a European speaker tour on Neurological Problems of Old Dogs . Seven talks, each about ninety minutes long, marching across the map: Lisbon, Madrid, Barcelona, Istanbul, Toulouse, Paris, and beyond. At the time, Hill’s had just launched a new therapeutic diet, Prescription Diet b/d , the first commercial food designed specifically to

If you pick up the program for almost any major veterinary conference, you’ll see two things very quickly: A long list of talks that qualify for CE hours, and   A dense forest of corporate logos. We’ve grown so used to this that it barely registers. It goes without saying that pharma, pet-food, diagnostics and corporate practice groups support our education. Of course , we sit through sponsored dinners and branded webinars to earn our hours. But who really owns our continuing

Across nine essays we’ve followed a pattern that has become impossible to ignore: How a profession built on compassion has been quietly re-engineered into a financial product. From the Marvel analogy  in Part 1 - where the Juggernaut of corporate greed gained its strength from the gem of private equity - to the global tour that took us through Australia ,  Europe ,  North America , and  the emerging markets of Asia ,  Africa , and  South America ,  each chapter has mapped a d

Walk into a clinic in Shanghai, São Paulo or Nairobi and the story still looks familiar:the smell of disinfectant, a nervous dog on the scales, a vet with a name badge rather than a corporate lanyard. But, increasingly, the money behind the scenes is changing. In Europe, Australia, and North America, we already know the script: Independent practices pulled into chains, chains sold to private-equity funds or conglomerates, prices and pressure quietly rising. Parts of Asia, Afr

Walk into a clinic in Denver, Toronto or Des Moines and it still feels local . A hand-written note on the whiteboard, a well-worn coffee mug on the desk, a vet who remembers your dog’s first vaccine. But follow the ownership trail and that local practice may now be part of a chain backed by global confectionery money, New York private equity funds, or a Luxembourg investment vehicle most clients have never heard of. As in Europe, this isn’t a simple story of good clinics vers