Medicine, whether human or animal, has experienced tremendous changes in the last 40 to 50 years. My father, after serving as a World War II Navy pilot on the U.S.S. Yorktown, went on to become a physician of internal medicine.

After the war, he and his young wife and infant son (the first of six children), moved to Atlanta, where Dad attended medical school at Emory University. Later, he would tell me lots of tales about med school and life at that time.

One story I remember involved the fact that one of his professors was the creator of Prednisalone - a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory medicine that we generally take for granted today. I also remember one of my professors at UNC Chapel Hill, in the late 1970s, telling the story of a new sugar that he was developing, called Equal. (Yes, I know I'm getting old if I can tell these tales!)

Dad also lived in the time of the creation of health-maintenance-organization (HMO) health insurance. With human medicine often being dictated by the insurance companies, my father commented that the best thing I ever did was go to veterinary school rather than medical school. This was good to hear, since all through my college years, all he ever said was, "Why don't you go to medical school?"

Veterinary medicine has also gone through dramatic changes in the last 50 years. We used to be the local "horse doctor," who then branched out to include all animals, and maybe even the occasional human in rural areas when no "real" doctors were available.

Even now, I have loyal clients who affectionately joke that with the degree of care and expertise I show toward their pets, they wish I were their doctor, too. Of course, I explain that it would be an illegal usage of my license to do so and respectfully decline.

But I can't tell you how often people have dropped their pants or opened their shirts to show me a privately located lesion and asked, "So what do you think, Doc?" - to which I quickly respond, "I think you need to see your doctor!"

I say this while thinking to myself, "Please don't show me that again, and thank God I'm a veterinarian and not a human doctor!"