Home > Veterinary Medicine Academic/Professional Guidelines .:
If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions related to veterinarians with hearing loss, please contact: Danielle Rastetter at DVM@amphl.org.
Guidelines/advice specific to the veterinary profession:
Safety around animals
If your hearing loss prevents you from hearing a cat hiss, a dog growl, or someone yelling at you to get out of the way of a horse that is getting ready to kick, you will need to be especially alert to all visual clues. You need to pay attention to what is going on around you at all times, and you may also want to ask others to warn you of potentially dangerous situations. Since your safety around the animals may be a concern to others, you need to demonstrate that you are prepared to deal with this issue.
Stethoscope use
Auscultation with a stethoscope is especially challenging for D/HOH veterinarians/veterinary students compared to those in other professions:
- Telling the patient to sit still and take deep breaths isn't an option!
- Purring and panting make it difficult even for hearing professionals to auscult their four legged patients! It is sometimes helpful with purring cats to hold an alcohol soaked cottonball in front of a cat's nose or to turn on running water to get the cat to stop purring long enough to be able to auscult the heart/lungs. Having a dog's owner or a veterinary staff member hold a dog's mouth closed while you auscult can help stop the dog from panting so you can hear.
- An animal's haircoat can also cause fur friction noise so care should be taken not to move the bell of the stethoscope back and forth across the animal while trying to listen. Hold the stethoscope as still as possible.
- Horses twitching their skin in response to flies can also cause extraneous noise. Generous use of fly spray and a lot of patience is required in those cases. Especially if trying to use a visual display stethoscope!
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