Veterinary professionals are often asked to assess or accept novel surgical techniques or new branches of veterinary medicine, so the ‘Big Issues’ stream hosted sessions under the title of ‘Just because we can, does it mean we should?’ on Saturday afternoon at Congress.
This saw an experienced panel tackling some of the procedures that crop up in general practice. Throw in an interactive audience voting element and the ingredients for a spicy session were underway. Three subjects, including blood transfusion, organ transplants and stem cell therapies, were chosen and polled with delegates. Results were a mixed bag depending on the case put forward.
As 92 per cent agreed that blood transfusion is generally acceptable, it seemed the answer was ‘yes, we should’, but when the terms changed to feline transfusion, 60 per cent of the audience agreed there were ethical concerns. Panellist and critical care specialist Sophie Adamantos regularly uses transfusion but advised donor selection is appropriate.
“There are variabilities and we have discussions about transfusion for individual cases,” she said. “There are complications that are not there generally in canine transfusion. Some cats do not tolerate it, but if you are extremely careful about selecting donors then it is less of an ethical concern.”
Kidney transplant when tabled had 79 per cent of the audience disagreeing with its use where a live donor is involved. RCVS councillor Sheila Crispin crystallised the arguments, saying: “It is not difficult surgery. The problem is management after surgery. We are light years away from what happens in human medicine in long term care for patients with multiple problems.”
Stem cell therapies while showing promise suffered from lack of evidence in the panel’s eyes, while an audience vote on the prospect of tranplanting stem cells from one animal to another showed 39 per cent agreed it was suitable, but almost as many (38 per cent) felt neutral about it.
Sheila Crispin said stem cell implantation offers the opportunity for real veterinary medicine breakthroughs, especially in her chosen field of opthalmology, but the science needs work. “Everyone likes the idea of stem cells, but it is absolutely evidence free in the profession at present,” she said.
Panellist James Yeates, Central Veterinary Officer for the RSPCA, added: “We are still struggling with the generation and application of evidence. We are getting to the point where we want to be as evidence-based as we can, but there are still lots of cases where this is lacking.”
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