This is a handy little book for veterinary technicians and veterinary technician students to have available when looking for practical information about common diseases seen in small animal practice. It is well-organized, brief, and includes plenty of color photographs. I believe that this book will be most useful to veterinary technicians who are looking for concise descriptions that will help them communicate essential information to clients regarding a pet’s diagnosis and treatment.
The bulk of the material focuses on dogs and cats, but diseases of other small mammals are included as well in separate chapters. The first chapter of the book describes the role of the veterinary technician in pathology—from participating as part of the diagnostic team, to providing nursing care to patients, educating clients, and preventing the spread of infectious disease.
The next three chapters cover canine infectious diseases, feline infectious diseases, and rabies. The infectious diseases are for the most part the common bacterial and viral conditions that we routinely vaccinate for. As an example: the canine chapter includes distemper, parvovirus, and infectious tracheobronchitis, but not borreliosis, ehrlichiosis, or brucellosis, and the feline chapter includes panleukopenia, feline leukemia, and feline immunodeficiency virus but not cytauxzoonosis, feline infectious anemia, or giardiasis.
The next eight chapters cover the pathology of disease by body system or organ: gastrointestinal tract, urinary tract, reproductive, endocrine, ocular, integumentary, musculoskeletal, and hematologic and lymph disease. Again, these are basic summaries of some common diseases and presentations. Each disease includes a paragraph or bulleted list for description, clinical signs, diagnosis, treatment, and client education and technician tips. There are some conspicuous absences (discussions of parasites, for example) and no chapters for the cardiovascular, respiratory, or nervous systems (although some of the diseases affecting these systems are covered in other chapters).
Some diseases are not addressed at all—no discussion of heartworm disease, for example—and the descriptions of others are too brief. For example, the section on diabetes mellitus does not include the differences between canine and feline diabetics, particularly in terms of dietary management, and it seems that clarity has been sacrificed to brevity, as in the statement “this disease requires frequent monitoring and lifelong insulin treatments,” which is not always true of cats diagnosed with diabetes.
The final three chapters in the book are: Diseases of Rabbits, Guinea Pigs and Chinchillas; Diseases of Ferrets; and Diseases of Hamsters, Gerbils, and Rats. These brief chapters describe the conditions that we are most likely to see in these patients.
There are online resources to accompany the printed text, including review questions and answers as well as case studies. These will be very useful in an educational or training environment when this text is used as a supplementary resource for individuals studying pathology and basic nursing. The references listed at the end of each chapter are an excellent starting point for additional reading and information about the pathologies described in this neat little book.
Publisher: Wiley Blackwell, 2014
ISBN 13: 9781118434215