Skip to main content

Doctors and dogs: why they shouldn't mix professionally

Why doctors and dogs should not mix on house visits to patients. This might seem a strange topic to discuss but it is important to health professionals and is something they don’t teach you about in medical school. Bottom line: always ensure the dog is in a separate room when you do a house call.

It’s very common when you arrive at a house to be do a home visit to be greeted by the sound of barking dogs. The owners will always try to reassure you that the dogs are "just being friendly" and are "harmless". Ignore them and insist the dogs are put in another room before you enter.

This sometimes causes resentment with the patient who often views the dog as a much-loved, close family member that is perfectly entitled to be present in the room while the patient has their consultation with the doctor. Do not give in to this pressure.

It is very difficult to carry out a clinical consultation while you have a dog (sometimes several dogs) jumping all over you, distracting you from your work, and getting in your way. And we are often talking here about very large dogs, not just small poodles and terriers. 

I’ve been fortunate and never had a "bad dog experience" during a home visit. But many colleagues have reported they have been bitten, had their clothes or equipment chewed; and sometimes even been urinated on. Having the dog in a separate room eliminates these risks. Prevention is better than cure.

If you have reached this far in blog, you have probably realised that I am not a “dog person”. Anyone who loves dogs and knows more about them than me is welcome to offer alternative suggestions about how to minimise the risks from dogs during house calls.


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What is the difference between primordial prevention and primary prevention?

Primordial prevention and primary prevention are both crucial strategies for promoting health, but they operate at different levels. Primordial prevention aims to address the root causes of health problems and improve the wider determinants of health. It focuses on preventing the emergence of risk factors in the first place by tackling the underlying social, economic, and environmental determinants of health. This involves broad, population-wide interventions such as: Policies that promote healthy food choices: Think about initiatives like taxing sugary drinks to discourage unhealthy consumption, or providing subsidies for fruits and vegetables to make them more accessible. Urban planning that prioritises well-being: This could include creating walkable neighborhoods with safe cycling routes, ensuring access to green spaces for recreation and relaxation, and designing communities that foster social connections. Social programs that address inequality: Initiatives aimed at reducing pov...
Post a Comment
Read more

UK Covid-19 Inquiry - The Importance of a Strong Primary Healthcare System

In my witness statement for Module 10 of the UK Covid-19 Inquiry, I discuss the pandemic's impact through from the perspectives of  primary care and public health, drawing on my extensive experience as a senior academic at Imperial College London and as a practising GP and NHS Public Health Specialist.  I emphasise that the pandemic disproportionately affected people who were clinically vulnerable, the disabled, ethnic minority communities and those living in deprived areas. The pandemic highlighted how structural inequalities, multigenerational housing, and employment in high-risk frontline roles exacerbated health disparities.  My statement also critiques the weakening of public health infrastructure - particularly for the control of infectious diseases - and the lack of integrated health data systems to identify at-risk groups such as the clinically vulnerable. I also advocated for a more robust preventive healthcare model that prioritises community-based primary care ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Relevance Over Recall: Rethinking How AI Uses Clinical Data

Our article in the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine argues that safe and effective AI in healthcare must incorporate mechanisms that emulate human judgement - down-weighting old, inaccurate or superseded information and prioritising what is recent, clinically relevant and reaffirmed - so that AI supports, rather than disrupts, high-quality patient care.  Clinicians constantly revise, reinterpret and filter past information so that only what is relevant, accurate and timely shapes present-day management decisions; medical records function as dynamic “working tools” rather than fixed archives. By contrast, many AI systems lack this capacity for selective forgetting and often treat all historical data as equally meaningful.  This can lead to outdated or low-confidence diagnoses being repeatedly resurfaced, persistent labels influencing clinical expectations, and irrelevant, long-resolved events cluttering summaries and decision-support outputs. Such indiscriminate recall...
Post a Comment
Read more