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Veterinary Terminology  is a reflective series about the words veterinarians use. How they arise, how they drift, and how they quietly shape professional thinking. This is not a series about catching errors or enforcing purity. It is about noticing habit, distinguishing precision from convenience, and preserving the language that allows a profession to think clearly. Veterinary medicine is built on language. Not decorative language. Not comforting language. But working langua

Two worlds divided by a single fracture. On one side, vocation, trust, and continuity. On the other, scale, control, and extraction. What breaks in between is not efficiency, but care. This is the lesson-set that doesn’t appear in pitch decks or exit memos, but it’s written all over 2025. Veterinary Medicine Is Not Infinitely Scalable Private equity (PE) entered veterinary medicine assuming it behaved like other service industries: standardize processes, centralize decision-

There are numbers we calculate with, and some numbers that find us . 444  belongs to the second category. You notice it on a clock - 4:44. On a license plate. On a receipt, a stock ticker, a page number you didn’t expect. At first, it feels like coincidence. Then it happens again. And again. Eventually, you stop dismissing it. Why 4 Matters at All Across cultures, the number 4  has long been associated with structure , balance , and   order . Four seasons. Four elements. Fou

Veterinary Terminology is a reflective series about the words veterinarians use. How they arise, how they drift, and how they quietly shape professional thinking. This is not a series about catching errors or enforcing purity. It is about noticing habit, distinguishing precision from convenience, and preserving the language that allows a profession to think clearly. Veterinary medicine depends on language in ways we rarely stop to examine. We use words to localize lesions, d

Every generation leaves fingerprints on language. Some are elegant. Some are clumsy. Some are deeply irritating to anyone over the age of about forty. And every so often, a word, or in this case, a number , appears that feels less like communication and more like a shared wink. In 2025, that word was 6-7 . Or 67 . Or six sev-uhn . According to the annual Banished Words List  from Lake Superior State University, 6-7  has officially been declared cooked , 1 a slang term that i

You hear the word everywhere now. Spat out as an insult on cable news. Dropped casually at a dinner party. Used as shorthand for everything I don’t like about the world right now . And yet, for a word that gets so much airtime, woke  has become oddly hollow. More signal than substance. More heat than light. So, it’s worth pausing to ask: what does woke actually mean? Where the Word Came From Originally, woke  wasn’t political branding or culture-war theater. It came from Bla

On the 20 th  of June 1980, Australian singer/songwriter Peter Allen  debuted his new song, I Still Call Australia Home , at the opening of the Sydney Entertainment Centre. I still call Australia home- Peter Allen (Video Version 1) - YouTube Allen then went on to perform it again at the 1980 Victorian Football League Grand Final with more than 100,000 people in the Melbourne Cricket Ground as well as being broadcasted live across Australia. I Still Call Australia Home would g

To be true blue  is to be loyal , trustworthy , steady , and unaffected . No performance. No pretense. It’s about character under quiet pressure . In Australia, true blue has long been shorthand for: Mateship without sentimentality, Fairness without moral grandstanding, Equality without hierarchy, and Decency without needing applause. A true blue person doesn’t announce their values. They live them. I have been away from Australia for much of the past fifty years.   Distanc

The Texas State Capitol rises from its hill in Austin with quiet authority. Its pink granite dome glowing warmly in the sun. It looks permanent. Inevitable. As if it has always been there. But the stone tells a longer story. The Journey of Value The granite that built the Capitol came from Burnet County in the Texas Hill Country, quarried from Granite Mountain near Marble Falls. It was cut, shaped, and hauled east by rail in the 1880s. Nearly 190,000 cubic feet of stone, each

From the highway just outside Burnet, Texas, the trains don’t look remarkable at first. Long, low cars. Pale stone. A steady, patient movement eastward. If you didn’t know what you were looking at, you might think it was just another freight run of grain, gravel, or something anonymous. But it isn’t anonymous. Those cars are filled with Hill Country caliche , scraped from land that took tens of thousands of years to form and only a few weeks to fracture and load. Carriage by

Veterinary medicine has begun to talk about burnout openly. That, at least, is progress. We name compassion fatigue . We circulate wellness resources. We encourage resilience, balance, mindfulness, time off. And yet, year after year, the problem worsens. More veterinarians leave clinical practice. More technicians exit the field entirely. Morale erodes. Distrust deepens. The profession feels strained in ways that no yoga class or wellness webinar seems able to repair. Perhap

We all know someone who prides themselves on being sure . At first glance, certainty looks like strength. It feels like a solid floor under our feet. But certainty without adaptability  - the refusal to adjust when reality changes - is less like a solid floor and more like concrete shoes in a rising tide. That’s the heart of the idea behind the phrase: Certainty without adaptability is a dangerous illusion . Psychologically, certainty is warm and comforting. Certainty: Reduc

A close friend who I have known for many years considers me to have well-developed perfectionist tendencies . He was being polite! He recommended a book ( Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff) in which author Richard Carlson suggests that perfectionism is more often a source of quiet suffering than excellence. As I look back on a fortunate life and career, I realize that Carlson has a point. Perfectionism often disguises itself as virtue. It tells us we have high standards, that we

Every veterinarian enters a profession they did not build. They inherit it. They inherit public trust. They inherit standards forged through hard cases, sleepless nights, and moral restraint. They inherit a culture shaped by people who accepted discomfort - financial, emotional, physical - because the work mattered. And yet, something unsettling is happening in veterinary medicine. Not because the work has become harder. But because our tolerance for difficulty has become thi

By this point in this four-part series , a picture has emerged: Part 1  asked who really owns veterinary continuing education when corporate logos dominate our conference programs.   Part 2  argued that counting hours  is a poor proxy for competence , and explored what outcome-focused CPD might look like.   Part 3  looked at how corporate sponsorship can quietly narrow the spectrum of care , and how good CPD can reopen it. Now comes the practical question: If we’re serious ab

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