Let’s get nasty.
On my first equine rotation, I had to take care of an animal with an “unruly penis.” [As a side note, this is perhaps my favorite diagnosis ever.] He wouldn’t pee normally and seemed to have problems retracting his member after his colic surgery. This went on for days with no improvement.
As someone who’s never worked with horses before vet school save some riding while in Girl Scouts, I was unnerved by the accumulation of smegma in my patient. Even after being told this was “normal,” being the compassionate future veterinarian that I am, I decided to take matters into my own hands… literally.
The Thick of It
Smegma is one of those amazingly onomatopoeic words that really describes the essence of its meaning… but it’s not the point of this. The point of this post is to point out the glaringly present and tragically insufficient depth and breadth of information present on the interwebs for owners of animals regarding veterinary health.
There’s so much to discuss when one starts (in the ironic setting of a blog) to address the amount of fallacious information propogated by websites that mostly mean well, but I’ll narrow it down to the omnipresent Wiki-empire, for fun’s sake.
When trying to explain to my nonveterinary friends the smegma chronicles, I found this website. Oh how I laughed, especially at the first bullet under “Warnings,” but it also gave me pause. Do people really rely on this information for medical or veterinary advice?
In a world where so many self-diagnose or self-vet their animals, what’s all my education for if you’re just going to turn to wikipedia for all the answers anyway?
