A Big Milestone and Some Announcements
Aid for North Carolina, Hill's Global Symposium, and re-posting some of my favorite essays
Dear Readers,
A few days ago, Substack informed me that I had crossed a significant milestone: My first 1,000 subscribers! 🥳
While there are many publications on Substack far larger than mine, veterinary medicine is a small community, and focusing on pathology and research puts me into an even tinier niche. For reference, there are <600 specialists in my specific field in veterinary pathology (and I’m sure only a minority subscribe), so my work must be able to catch the interest of enough readers outside that community!
I know I shouldn’t care about superficial things like subscriber counts, but I gotta be honest: I’m damn proud to have grown my audience to this level. At this time last year, I had about 1/5 the subscribers, so this represents significant growth.
Thanks to everyone who continues to read my ramblings in your inbox 🙌 It means more than you could know.
—Eric
Aid for North Carolina
As I wrote last week, Hurricane Helene ripped through Florida and the rest of the southeast with a vengeance, leaving over one hundred dead and many more missing. Millions still have no power and tens of thousands are without running water. Gas, internet, and cell service have also been disrupted.
Some of the areas most impacted are the mountain towns of western North Carolina, particularly Asheville, where several of my friends live. Luckily, the people I know were not seriously injured, although the scenes they describe are harrowing, with many buildings flooded and destroyed, long lines for water and other rations, roads and bridges still closed. President Joe Biden just approved sending 1,000 Army troops to North Carolina to aid the National Guard and speed recovery efforts.
If you would like to help out people in Asheville and the rest of North Carolina:
Donations: You can follow this link from the NC State extension to a list of verified charities to give money to provide food, water, supplies, and aid to clean-up damaged areas
I donated to the North Carolina Disaster Relief Fund and I would encourage you to research the charity that resonates best with you and give whatever you can
Volunteer: While most people are advised to avoid the areas severely impacted by the storm, the North Carolina Veterinary Medical Association has set up a page for veterinarians and vet techs to help with lost, sick, and injured animals
Hill’s Global Symposium
I mentioned in a previous newsletter that I will be speaking at the Hill’s Global Symposium at the end of the month. My lecture on AI will open the “Future Tech in Veterinary Medicine” sessions on Friday 10/25.
There are 17 excellent speakers this year, ranging from vet schools like UC Davis and Ohio State, to Hill’s pet nutrition scientists, to private consultants. The main topics discussed focus on the gastrointestinal tract’s role in overall health, the gut microbiome, and the gut-kidney axis. I am looking forward to the keynote by Rob Knight, PhD, who previously gave an incredible TED Talk on the microbiome that showed how fecal transplants can cure patients with Clostridium difficile infections.
While this event takes place in person in Cancun, Mexico, it will be live-streamed globally and available on-demand afterwards. Registration for the livestream is FREE, so I encourage anyone interested to sign up and watch remotely.
Link to event 👇
Hill's Global Symposium 2024 Agenda and Registration
Favorite Essays
Finally, since so many readers are new to All Science, I wanted to take this opportunity to re-post several of my favorite articles from the past two years. I hope you enjoy!
The Red Flags of Quackery
You are what you read. Much like the common adage about the impact of diet on your body, your mental and intellectual health is heavily influenced by the quality of information you ingest. Yet we live in an era with so much information it can be hard to keep up, let alone figure out what’s true or valuable within the sea of garbage online.
This article discusses tell-tale signs of medical misinformation and pseudoscience. Read it to make sure you aren’t getting misled online!
An Explosion of Vet Schools
A recent JAVMA news article discussed the huge number of planned veterinary schools coming to the US in the near future: “Nearly a dozen newly proposed veterinary colleges have been announced in the past two years, which represents a sizeable potential increase to the existing 33 U.S. veterinary colleges. Some universities have already secured site visits from the [AVMA Council on Education] COE while others are just in the discussion stage.”
A deep-dive into the surge in proposed and newly formed vet schools. Find out what the data says about a vet shortage and how these programs will fit in
Quitting Time
My patient was dying. She lay on her side in the emergency triage area, hyperventilating as much as I was while I tried to figure out what was wrong. To go along with the rapid shallow breaths, the dog’s pulses were fast and weak, her blood pressure nearly unreadable, and her gums were pale. Giving multiple boluses of IV fluids did not help her. A blood gas confirmed what was obvious: the dog was not getting enough blood and oxygen to tissues throughout the body. Clearly, she was in shock, but why?
Reflections on my time in clinical practice and why I decided to leave it
In the Blood
It started with a DNA test. The human body contains approximately 30,000 genes composed of three billion pairs of DNA molecules. All of the diversity and richness of our species flows from slightly different combinations of the nucleotides we’ve named “A,” “C,” “G,” and “T.” While the vast majority of Homo sapiens have the same core genes—our DNA is 98.8% identical to chimpanzees—slight sequence changes account for huge variations in height, weight, appearance, intelligence, talents, and disease susceptibility.
My journey of discovering I was donor conceived through a commercial DNA test
When Pathology Becomes Personal
"Autopsies give us the facts but not the truth."
— Richard Selzer, MD
A tribute to my late cats Phoenix and Ezra who passed in 2022, and a meditation on experiencing pathology from the other side as a pet owner
Great job!! Hopefully we will meet in person someday...though...I don't frequent path conferences...
Congratulations on 1000 subscribers Eric!