Nowadays when I have a doctor's appointment, I find an opportunity to tell the doctor that I'm a vet student. I'm sure some level of my brain does this because it doesn't want the doctor to think it is a silly brain for using medical terms. Everyone knows that patients find medical terminology to be incomprehensible jargon, so the patients who try putting forward a vocab word or two of their own probably spent an hour of quality time with some medical websites.
But Mayo's help page does not a doctor make...so I try to clarify where I got my information. Otherwise, we get conversations like this:
Me: "So, I suppose one of the things that could be causing stomach pain, if it's not just stress related, could be Crohn's?"
Doctor: "Ah, so you've been doing some reading online, then?"
"Um...we went over it in class a month ago. Did I mention what I'm in school for?"
Granted, vets aren't supposed to diagnose human disease. We had a session on this today: if a woman comes in with a ringworm positive cat, and she has what is obviously a ringworm lesion on her forearm, you are allowed to diagnose the cat and start it on treatment, but you can't tell the woman anything beyond, "Maybe you should go see your doctor."
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