Rankins":2dsob1kn said:
Hard to accept a diagnosis when there were no diagnostic testing done. In other words, the vets were guessing....
Sorry your vet sucked (at least that day anyway). I hope it turns out to be nothing. That stud could end up being your prize breeding mule!
Let me apologize up front for venting, but I get really agitated with the medical field when they don't do any real diagnostic testing. If I wanted a best guess, I'm more than intelligent enough to look stuff up on the internet. My dad died almost 4 years ago because multiple doctors treated his back pain, which were only symptoms of his prostate cancer, but they never did any diagnostic testing to find the root cause of the symptoms. The first issue happened on vacation. My dad never went to the doctor for pain, so when he asked to go we knew he was in a lot of pain. The quack in the box tossed him some pain pills, which for an urgent care is about the best you can expect. When he got home (after vacation) to his normal doctors for follow up they just gave him steroids to reduce any inflammation, which helped reduce the pain, but in reality it just masked the issue, allowing it to progress instead of treating the cancer as early as possible. Several months later when he was scheduled for surgery to repair something with an arm he broke previously, totally unrelated to the cancer, the doctor noticed muscle atrophy (reduction in the muscle mass) in the arm and sent my dad to a neurologist who immediately thought it was a tumor pressing on the spine causing the muscle atrophy and he ordered a MRI which found the tumor and prostate cancer. At the same time I had knee pain and the orthopedist took an X-Ray, which is great for bones, but not so much for cartridge. The doctor gave me a steroid shot in my knee, and signed me up for a month of heavy physical therapy, twice a week. After the month of PT ended my knee was worse than before, but the doctor refused to do any further diagnostic testing and told me I didn't need surgery and was basically staring at me to leave his office because as far as he was concerned, he was done and ready for his next patient. Since at that point my dad had just passed away 2 weeks before because no diagnostic testing was done, I probably pleaded (OK, argued) my case a bit more passionately than required, but in the end I was scheduled for an MRI. I took this to another doctor who specialized in only knees and after looking at my MRI he wouldn't even let me walk to the bathroom without stopping me to get crutches to keep weight off my right knee because the meniscus (cartridge) was torn that badly, and scheduled me for the first available surgery slot. I hate to think how much damage was done to my knee from the month of physical therapy. I had knee surgery less than 4 years ago, and I'll probably have to have surgery in the next year again, and my dad passed away all due to doctors taking their "best guess" versus forcing them to do diagnostic testing. Sorry for the rant, but I just wanted to stress how important it is to force your doctors to do diagnostic testing. A 'guess' diagnosis is just a fast way to get you out of the door and spin the cookie cutter process and collect co-pays, but can cause you multiple trips to the doctor down the road, and cause issues to be even more severe down the road. Keep in mind pain killers only mask the pain. Pain is your body's way of telling you something is wrong and stopping you from causing more damage, so when you use pain killers, there is a real chance you are not noticing the pain and just causing further damage.
