....I have a local vet who only practices with "exotics" which means reptiles but also birds, ferrets, and the like. Despite his many years working with snakes, it has been my experience that all of the most serious testing (like post mortems) are farmed out to other specialized labs. This is the same experience I have had with my own local doctors. I recently had biopsies performed on three moles on my back. The tissue samples were sent out to a specialized lab for the pathology to be performed. Fortunately, the pathologist found the cells to be of the normal variety. I think there are negatives and positives to this practice. On one hand, medicine is removed yet one more step from the patient. It becomes more impersonal and the results are filtered through more people (kind of like hearing a story after it was retold for the tenth time). On the other hand, my hope is that the doctor examining the tissue is very well trained and experienced at that particular task (but we never know). I think it would be advantageous to find a vet or lab that would have the expertise and interest to work with a large number of boa owners and help us learn about our animals on a broader level. The best scenario would be to find a person who is both a boa owner and a vetinarian. The biggest problem to our learning what we need to know is that the local vets are seeing the problem on such an isolated and small scale. They may see a deceased albino boa in 2005 and then not examine another one until 2009. We need someone who is going to examine boas on a regular basis and begin to accumulate the data necessary to draw some real conclusions.



It would be beneficial if we were more organized on a national level. Let's say we had a dues paying national association of boa & python hobbyists. We could sponser a scholarship whereby we could select a talented vetinary student who would be given the task of researching the major health issues affecting boids. Rather than our monies going toward "hazy" diagnoses from local vets with limited experience, we would paying for more definitive results and contributing to a centralized effort of data gathering.



Of course, an effort like this would be a bit more costly but the limited resources of medical research have always been guided by dollars. Third world diseases are almost completely ignored by drug companies.....unless the disease shows up here.

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