Funny Vet

My next thoughts are offered as both complaint and advice regarding those that put these lectures on.  Jazz it up, people!  I mean, really, is it that difficult to come up with ways of educating others in a stimulating manner?  It’s like the lecturers are in a competition to see how many attendees they can lull into somnolence and how fast.  I can get the same results with a moderate dose of valium and the Home Shopping Network on low volume.  I don’t think I’m going out on a limb here to say that most attendees are practitioners who are looking for useful, applicable information, not a review on all of the properties of Descemet’s membrane or a way-too-long-a-time spent on the statistics behind a research study.  It becomes very obvious that these lectures are the same ones that they give in veterinary schools with no tailoring toward a different audience.  We don’t need to know your credentials, your graphs, your diagrams, your research papers, or your affiliations with certain companies or products.  All of this just takes up way too much time and wears deep ruts in our frontal lobes and cause lesions in our hypothalamus (look it up).  We trust you.  You are at a level in your field where you get to go and present lectures at national conventions.  Yay!  Good for you!  Now get down to the essential, practical details.  While some people believe we can learn while we sleep, typically this is not considered the best approach to higher education.  With that in mind, don’t give the good stuff in the last ten minutes for this same reason.  You’re not Lynyrd Skynyrd and your material is not “Free Bird”.

Here was a conversation I had with one person (this was during that awkward time when you‘re sharing a lunch table with a stranger and feel the need to fill the silence):

Stranger:  “It’s hard, with all of these choices, finding a good lecture.”

I think the biggest problem is that the lecturers feel compelled to fill their fifty minutes of infamy.  This isn’t their fault.  And whoever decided that CE should be based on amount of time?  Isn’t it interesting that something like education is based on a quantitative and not a qualitative scale?  I’m just saying.  Perhaps they could show more case studies if they really needed to fill the time.  I would think there would be all sorts of unusual cases that these specialty lecturers see.  How about showing cases that didn’t respond to certain treatments or those that had complications?  How about describing how you go about convincing clients to pursue treatments, especially long-term or expensive ones?  You certainly don’t use your lecture material to get them to do it, that’s for certain.

I will admit, I do seem to have the worst luck in picking lectures.  So, maybe my perspective gets a little skewed from that.  It often seems like the good lectures are occurring where I am not.  I’ll hear people all the time talking about how useful so-and-so’s lecture was.  I don’t know why they called him so-and-so, but apparently he was good.  I wandered into a good class randomly once and they stopped talking until I left.  I even ended up in the same bad class twice.  It just had a different name on a different day and it took me about half-way through to realize, “Hey!  These slides look really familiar!”  Oh, look, the exit door is just five feet away! There was one anesthesia class where all I remember is the lights going out and waking up feeling a little groggy and I was missing some twenties from my wallet.  Another time I followed an eight dollar hot dog with a gastrointestinal lecture - bad idea!  I got a cramp from an uncomfortable chair during a lameness lecture.  And there was a dystocia class that was so full I was really worried about being able to get out when it ended.

I’d like to point out the phrases that seemed to keep recurring no matter what lecture I was in, as if everyone attended the same public speaking seminar.  I have also provided my interpretation in italics for each phrase: