A Lifetime of Lessons

Welcome everyone,

People often ask me how I’ve learned so much over the years. The truth is, animals have spent their whole lives teaching me.

If you’ve followed me over the years, you already know that I’ve never been someone who likes to overcomplicate things.

For more than fifty years I’ve been practicing veterinary medicine. I’ve treated a wide variety of animals, from dogs and cats to horses and cows, birds and snakes… and even white mice and hedgehogs. It’s one of the reasons I still wake up every morning excited to go to work. I’ve delivered calves in blizzards, stitched up farm dogs in the middle of the night, and spent countless hours helping families keep the animals they love healthy.

There is so much information out there these days that it can be hard to know what or who to believe. The internet has made it easier than ever to find information, but it hasn’t always made it easier to separate good information from bad. Hardly a day goes by that someone walks into my clinic convinced their dog has some rare disease because they spent the night reading things online. Most of the time, it’s an upset stomach, a minor infection, or something we’ve treated thousands of times before.

That’s why I decided to start this blog.

This won’t be a place filled with fancy medical language or advice you don’t understand. We’ll talk about real problems that real pet owners and farmers face every day. Sometimes the answer is simple. Sometimes it isn’t. But I’ll always tell you what I’ve learned, what I know, and when I don’t.

I’ve answered thousands upon thousands of questions in the clinic, at speaking events, and from people who stop me in the grocery store. I realized that if one person has a question, chances are thousands of others have the same one. This is my chance to answer those questions for everyone.

We’ll talk about things like:

• Common health problems in dogs and cats.
• Understanding nutrition and how food affects your animal’s health.
• Preventing problems before they start.
• What symptoms deserve a trip to your veterinarian and which ones can safely be watched at home.
• Farm animal medicine and livestock care.
• The stories and lessons I’ve collected over a lifetime of veterinary practice.
• Questions that people ask me every single day.
• The science behind the Dr. Pol products and why I created them.

Veterinary medicine is always evolving, and no veterinarian knows everything. I still learn something new almost every day. That’s one of the reasons I haven’t retired. After all these years, there’s still something new to discover. But I’ve also learned that common sense is one of the most valuable tools we have, and sometimes we forget that. In my experience, good veterinary medicine is about asking the right questions, paying attention to the animal in front of you, and sometimes remembering that the simplest solution is often the best one. That approach has served me well, and it’s the same approach I’ll bring to everything I write here.

I also hope you’ll get to know me a little better beyond what you’ve seen on television. There are plenty of stories that never made it onto the screen, moments that made me laugh or reminded me why I became a veterinarian in the first place.

My hope is that every time you visit, you’ll leave knowing just a little bit more than when you arrived. If that helps you make a better decision for your pet or gives you a little more peace of mind, then we’ve accomplished something worthwhile.

So grab a cup of coffee, pull up a chair, and let’s talk animals.

We’ll see you next time.  And remember: take good care of your animals, and they’ll take good care of you.

– Dr. Jan Pol