Providing reptile care in primary practice

How can primary practices enhance their services with reptile care? In this video, La'Toya Latney, DVM, DECZM (ZHM), DABVP (Reptile & Amphibian), CertAqV, senior veterinarian at The Schwarzman Animal Medical Center in New York, New York, discusses several ways that general practitioners can incorporate reptile care into their clinics using tools and knowledge they already have on hand or have access to. Latney spoke to dvm360 during the NAVC SkillShop in Orlando, Florida, where she presented lectures on reptile medicine.

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The following is a transcript of the video:

La'Toya Latney, DVM, DECZM (ZHM), DABVP (Reptile & Amphibian), CertAqV: [General practitioners] probably already have the tools, because medicine is medicine, right? Whether you're a fish, reptile, cat, dog…. [Clinics should be] comfortable with offering blood work. The way in which we acquire the blood samples is very similar to something they already learned in vet school for another species.... There are places where they can send the blood out. There are actually machines that a lot of people have, point-of-care machines, and [in] some of the critical care places, they could actually run the blood in-house.

[Get] them familiar with molecular diagnostics. There are a number of different companies that offer PCR [polymerase chain reaction] probes and PCR tests for specific reptile pathogens, and they're quite cost-effective. They actually end up being cheaper than [many] culture sensitivity panels for aerobic, anaerobic, and fungal. You can swab and send it out. They'll give you all of this information about what pathogens they may have found and what their…antibiotic genetic resistances for these things [are]. I think those are probably the biggest things.

Everyone knows how to do a fecal, but they [may say], ‘Yeah, I can do a fecal, but what's normal vs abnormal when I look under the microscope to see?’ So again, there are all these little things that they already almost have access to. It’s just a matter of feeling comfortable about where to send samples and how to evaluate them once they've been acquired.