The future of veterinary medicine has always been promising. As long as people have animals, they will want someone to be able to provide them medical Care. I do agree with the previous answers. Technology, as it continues to improve, will become an increasingly large part of veterinary medicine as it becomes better and more affordable. As for the immediate future, there are a couple legislative issues I’d like to bring to you, the people of quora’s, attention.
For one, there is a new legislation that goes active in January called the Veterinary Feed Directive. The VFD mandates that all antibiotics must be used on order by a veterinarian, and with a prescription. This has arisen from traceable antibiotic resistance as healthy animals become breeding grounds for resistant bacteria. Hasn’t it always been like that? Matter of fact it hasn’t. Feed companies, with a license, can currently sell feed with antibiotics in it to use as maintenance to prevent illness, and in some cases to boost growth. After the VFD takes affect, these feeds will not exist. Or, youll have to have a prescription to use them. For the veterinarian, this means a lot more work. Especially when we start talking about feed lots and other commercial cattle, sheep, pig, goat, etc… operations.
A second idea that has developed has also arisen in response to antibiotic resistance. Because of similar physiology, lots of antibiotics are used both in human and animal medicine. Penicillin, Amoxicillin, and Cephalexin are all common antibiotics used in both fields of medicine. However, because of this bacteria that can infect humans and exist on animal hosts either as a pathogenic or dormant microbe, acquire resistance from use in animal medicine and then subsequently infect people. Who are treated, inaffectively, by the same antibiotics used on the animal. Therefore, there has been a huge push to further divide the 2 fields. Human medicine is well funded for research already, but veterinary medicine would get a little bonus. The idea being that we will develop antibiotics used souly for animals, and leave human antibiotics to humans to prevent cross resistance.
in summary, technology will improve. of this I have no doubt. And secondly, we’re in the near future going to see some fairly substantial changes in how we use antibiotics. Thanks for making it this far in the response! i hope it was helpful:)
