Clinical Pathology of Metabolic Disorders

Abstract

Today we are seeing more and more cattlemen and dairymen doing their own treatment and doing quite well. They can treat but they cannot diagnose. Yes, they can, but they need your help! I have been around a little, and I have visited many veterinarians and spent a day to a week with them, and I admire very much a practitioner who takes plenty of time on a diagnosis, looks the animal over, gets the history, the symptoms, and resorts to autopsies. Then with this magnificent computer, the brain, he comes up with a diagnosis! As you know, our brain is like a computer. They tell me our brain is equivalent to 48 acres of computers, and we only use about five acres of them at the very most. Even so, we have a built-in intuition and experience to diagnose, and we can certainly be a lot more helpful and more positive of our diagnosis by supporting this with a few laboratory tests. I am going to give you an example today where we can do a little barnyard clinical pathology to help with the situation at hand. We also need to be a little more sophisticated and send a blood sample to the laboratory so that when we come back and see the case again in a few days, we will have some information to either support or confirm our diagnosis. I am also going to tell you a little bit about the analysis of hair in your everyday practice. In order to be useful, these tests have to be fairly cheap, and they have to give us considerable information. As we learn to use them, we will soon get to the place where we feel almost helpless without some type of laboratory test.