Should we shine some light on the online trolls in veterinary medicine?

Veterinarians are killing themselves. That is a fact. There are a lot of theories about why. It’s complicated. But one thing we know about this difficult profession is that clients can be exceptionally hard on veterinarians. Whether they are asking for unreasonable services or access that you would never dream of asking of a physician, or complaining about costs, or just straight up abusing veterinarians, the client part of this equation is difficult to ignore.

One area that I find troubling is the online trolling and, let’s just call it what it is, abuse. Thinly veiled reviews or not at all thinly veiled insults and abuse are running rampant. Most of the vitriol has a theme, and that theme is that people are mad about the cost of veterinary care. Likely also embarrassed and grief stricken about the fact that their pet is sick and they can not afford to take care of them, but instead of reflecting on that, these trolls choose to attack veterinarians as “heartless” or “crooks” or worse. Recently, I saw a post that shocked me, it got in my head. (See figure at bottom, with the identifiers removed. Warning, it is horrific.) It was a post that a client wrote on a veterinary hospital’s Facebook site. This is an emergency hospital that saw a cat with a urethral obstruction. This is a universally fatal condition without treatment…