On Veterinary Practice as the First Beneficiary of New Medicine
The stifling regulation attending medical research and development ensures that veterinary medicine is years ahead of human medicine: "Products in the veterinary medical space can be brought to market more rapidly, iterated upon more rapidly, and therefore improved more rapidly. With owners eager to try new treatments, lower barriers to entry for new products, and far less risk of lawsuits dogs and other pets offer great advantages for development of therapies. ... Owners of pets who try assorted stem cell therapies, gene therapies, and the like have information that is now not being collected systematically. That's a great lost opportunity and the opportunity will grow with each new treatment that reaches the veterinary market. If vets could also report information then test results could be combined with owner observations (e.g. did Fido start running again after stem cells injected into joints?) then the efficacy (or lack of efficacy) of therapies could be discovered much more rapidly. This ties into a bigger problem: As things stand today truly objective medical research is much rarer than generally appreciated. We need basically open source medical research with large amounts of data collected independent of companies that develop drugs and other treatments. Given enough software and some group (could be mostly volunteers) to manage a web site to collect pet medical histories many others could analyze the data. Pets are also great for research information collection because with pets privacy isn't a big consideration. My guess is most people won't mind having their pet's medical history made public if they can see a benefit for their current and future pets and for humans as well. Given public availability of the data a far larger number of people with requisite training in statistics, medicine (veterinary or otherwise), and biological sciences could do analyses and discover patterns in the data."