Hello everyone and welcome back to the Vet Files with Gretel
Wurdak. And today we are talking with
Doctor Michael Bailey, the 2025 to 2026 President of the
American Veterinary Medical Association.
A board certified veterinary radiologist, Doctor Bailey
earned his DVM from Tuskegee University and completed his
internship and radiology residency and Michigan State
University. His career spans academia,
private practice, innovation, and policy.
He has served on the faculty at Tuskegee and Michigan State,
achieved tenure at The Ohio State University, and contribute
extensively to both veterinary and human medical literature.
Doctor Bailey also pioneered advanced veterinary CT imaging
services, helped expand national telemedicine and imaging
networks, and currently works in medical innovation within global
telemedicine consulting. Thank you so much for joining
us, Doctor Bailey. My pleasure, thank you for
having me. Of course, to start, I'd love to
hear about your journey to becoming president of the AVMA.
Could you expand on your career path?
Don't know if we have enough time, but here's the In a quick
nutshell, to become involved at the high levels of ABMA is a
long journey. You don't decide, wake up and
tomorrow you do it. It took me 20 years, so I'm not
saying it would take you 20 years, but it took me 20 years
to do it. And that's because you need to
get a basic understanding of organized veterinary medicine at
a more local level. And you take that up through the
ABMA, which included going from president of the Pennsylvania
Veterinary Medical Association to becoming a delegate in the
House of Delegates of the ABMA, then running to what's called a
district director. In my case, I became district
director of District 2, which was New Jersey, Delaware,
Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania and District of
Columbia. I thought that was going to be
the end of it. And then as I neared the end of
my district director, which is a six year term, I decided there
was more I wanted to do and a few things I wanted to say, and
I ran for president. And now that is a three-year
term because we become president-elect.
Then you become president for a year.
And when you become immediate past president and when you're
through, you go and you have your head examined, you need to
try and understand not just the insurance and outs of your
organization, but other organizations which you're going
to interact with and realize it comes down to, for example, the
AVMAS is is incorporating the state of Illinois and its bylaws
are there. So there's legal aspects.
It's not just a matter of, oh boy, I'm going to do what it
says. The association you have to do
what the state says also for an example.
That is so interesting. I did not know that, so I
attended the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign.
So is the AVMA, is it like in the headquarters or in Chicago
area that's. They're in Schaumburg, which is
a suburb of Chicago. That's right.
So in downtown Schaumburg. Who would have thought I I
always had this image of the AVMAI just saw the first image
of like the House of Jelly. I was like, whoa, that is an
intimidating big room. But I was like, do they have an
office? Do they function on their own?
Do you keep your day-to-day job and then this is just piled on
top of it? That last one it's piled on top
of. So you keep your day-to-day job
and then you make time to do the volunteer activities which the
AVMA asks you to do. In the case of the president,
you're on almost 24 hours a day, seven days a week because you
may have interviews you I'm not even like podcast, but podcast
and the ABMA president was you are extremely involved with the
politics of the ABMA. You're also very much involved
with letting people know what veterinary medicine is about.
There is A and when not just talking about general public
kids, politicians, but also veterinarians, there's amazing
how many veterinarians don't realize things like the first
FDA approved surgical robot was designed, built and programmed
by a veterinarian. And I say that because I try to
tell people all the time there's no limit to what veterinarians
can do. So that's just one example.
I went to a drone competition at the Mascalero Apache Indian
Reservation a few weeks ago and those kids there are flying
drones all over the place and programming them.
It's amazing they can do it. I asked them what they plan on
doing and asked them did they see under the other
applications. What they were doing was
actually preparing them to be the next generation of
veterinarian. The hand eye coordination, the
programming skills and artificial intelligence.
They already know the understanding of sensors and
whatnot. That's a great place to recruit
kids in the veterinary medicine, I think.
That's such a unique perspective because I think when people
think of medicine and they think of agriculture, they don't think
of like robots or technology. Actually at University of
Illinois, that was where I attended undergrad, I think they
had the first program in the country where it was a combined
animal science and computer science degree.
So they're starting, but there were only I believe like 3
people in the program. So I'm excited to see like where
we'll take them. But U of I has a very difficult
computer science program, so I think that was more of the turn
off for most people. Or they just didn't even have
the idea of how diverse veterinary medicine could be.
Computers, when I was going through high school, computers
where you did not have them on your desk, much less in your
telephone. When I went to college, I used
the slide rule. Yes, folks, a slide rule is a
piece of wood that tells you complicated mathematics.
And we put the first people on the moon using slide rules.
If people were to think about the fact that the power in your
cell phone is more powerful than the computers they use to put
the first people into space and on the moon, we're so far beyond
that for do not think of computer science as being
complicated. The only people who make
computer science complicated are the ones who want to keep it to
themselves. It can be, I don't want to say
it's easy. It can be as practical as
cooking that world class cake or changing the spark plugs in your
car. And I put it that way because
not everybody can do those things.
But in many cases, if you want to learn how to do it, you can.
That's a great perspective to have.
I have taken AP Computer Science, that is the closest
thing. It was not my talent, but I
would say especially now that we're talking about AI today, I
think people can have more help with it than they used to.
Yeah, it might have mistakes, but at least get them started.
Well, think about before you had to know all the insurance and
outs of writing code and nobody could really check it for you.
You ran it through the computer, and if it ran, it ran.
If it crashed then you have to go back and debug it.
My first computer program was stored on paper that's showing
you how old I am. But now if you want to, you can
get a start by going into one of the readily available programs
and say please write a program in Python that performs this
task and it will write the program for you.
I would have loved that in AP Computer Science because I
crashed mine all the time. So did I, I'll be honest with
you, I I crashed my programs all the time too.
But it's just the fact it we've gone from that to, yeah, there's
now basically LEGO's building block and programs.
That's really best thing to say. Right.
It's changed the field a lot. Speaking of changing fields, so
your role as AVMA president, you have to bridge the gap between
not only veterinarians, but the public.
So AI is becoming a huge issue, not an issue in healthcare, but
a huge topic in healthcare. Could you describe that role,
what we're seeing in veterinary medicine with AI so far?
AI is just another tool. And like every tool, and I'm
going to say this, people are going to say, yeah, but we, we,
we don't have this. But really, you should not have
a car driving down the road without somebody in the car.
It may get to that point, but today we're not ready for it.
So that's AI. You always need to have a human
in the loop and that's because AI tell people, 14 year olds,
you're going to hate me because I'm going to pick on you.
I tell people that AI is like a 14 year old.
They are very convincing liars. You do not necessarily know when
they're lying and AI is that convincing 14 year old.
It can tell you a lie called hallucinations, which can be
seen so real and then we'll find out after the fact.
Didn't really do that so I won't pick on 14 year olds anymore.
How sad. Say I've seen it say things
incorrectly, especially now that I'm in veterinary school and I
will use it to make practice exams just to prepare
adequately. It can never make a practice
exam as difficult as my professors.
Secondly, it always simplifies it and then the simplification
it can actually get things wrong.
Yeah, oversimplifies. Yes, exactly.
But you see, what you are dealing with is probably a
program that has biased to be more of an explainer than a
tester. And that's one of the things
that people have to realize that AI does and probably will always
have some degree of biases. People have biases.
It's a program made by people. What do I mean by a bias?
Let's say everything you trained on and these programs have to be
trained. So if you took all of your
professor's questions, all of them for let's say 10 years,
assuming your professor's been teaching for 10 years and put
them in there, it probably would learn your professor's style and
write questions in your professor's style.
But well, let's say that your professor knew nothing about
hats and you put a question in there about cats that say it was
doing great on the dog or the horse question, but it knows
nothing about cats. Now it's going to say, OK, it
starts giving you something and it's trying to make it up
because it doesn't want to let you know that it doesn't know
the answer. That's just the way it's
programmed. So it's biased towards dogs and
you have to be very careful about that.
So we were talking a little bit before we talked about bias.
So it's biased in the way that it goes back to whatever its
training is. So in diagnostics, there's the
potential like if you gave them all your notes and your soaps
for years and then put in the same symptoms, maybe you could
file your line of diagnostics in the past.
However, it's not seeing the animal so some people will
probably come into the office. They probably looked in ChatGPT
my dog is throwing up, has a beep.
Just naming random things and could think it's one thing but
it's entirely different. Is there a lot of danger in
that? Extremely.
I'll give you an example that happens in real life.
And remember what we're talking about is artificial
intelligence. Let's say you have a dog, you
live in New Jersey. I grew up in New Jersey.
You have a large breed dog, you bring it in, you take a
radiograph, and there's an osteolytic lesion in one of the
long bones. So living in New Jersey, I'd
say, well, this could be an infection, but it's more likely
cancer. And I train it.
Whenever it sees a large breed dog coming in with a long bone,
the first thing it puts on the list is going to be cancer,
osteosarcoma, for example. Now, let's say that that dog has
a twin who didn't grow up in New Jersey, but it grew up in
Arizona, same litter, you know, it was out of the same litter,
out of the same parents and whatnot.
And around the same time it comes in with an osteolytic
lesion. And let's say you took to say
I've got a program that I've been using in New Jersey and
it's been working great. And you run that on it and
what's it tell you? It tells you cancer.
However, the dogs in Arizona, I would at least remember I set
off saying well it could be infection.
Was crying in Arizona. First thing I might think about
would be fungal disease. But your AI doesn't know
anything about fungal disease because you never had one come
in. So it's going to tell you cancer
and tell you about the diagnostics for fungal disease.
Right. I guess it's not thinking about
where they are in the climate as well.
So it's not just symptoms, it's also background that it has no
idea. Well, see, I the dogs could both
have the exact same symptoms. They're out of the same litter,
the same breed. That's where they grew up.
Wow, we've been talking a lot about not necessarily negatives,
but just be aware, be educated about it with AI, what are some
positives for animal health and welfare with it?
There's a lot of positives, and really we're veterinarians.
And the reason I'm bringing that up right now, if it's not
obvious, is because we're responsible not just for animal
health, but for human health and environmental health.
OK, so one health. So what are some of the
positives? AI.
Well, computers and AI is extremely fast.
It can compile a large amount of data very, very quickly.
So if it is an adequately trained system, let's assume
that it is and you have a dog that comes in 8:00 in the
morning. You do your typical diagnosis.
You as being the high in demand clinician that we know that you
are will be haven't had a chance to look at anything yet.
But Mr. and Misses Jones are in the waiting in the exam room
waiting for you to come in to to give them some idea what's going
on with their fur baby. And now you're looking through
your AI generated report. It has taken all the data that's
been coming in all day long and it's compiling it.
You're looking to see if anything's missing.
So when you get to the door, it gives you its top three
differentials. Whereas if you were doing it
yourself, you'd have to say, I'll call you tomorrow after
I've had a chance to look through it and you probably
still would not have a chance to go through all the information.
We can diagnose some diseases six months earlier now with AI
than we could before, because it takes all these subtle trending
changes and whatnot and it can analyze them.
And that early diagnosis, just think the pet may not be showing
any clinical signs. It may just be routine exam or
even several exams because it loves trending and it's starting
to see things. And let's say it's a patient
that's developing cushions disease.
If we can treat it six months before it starts showing any
clinical signs, we may be able to prevent the chronic clinical
changes that this pet is going to develop.
And therefore we now live in their life because they are
never going to suffer from the chronic disease of Cushing's or
whatever disease we want to talk about.
That's what AI is going to afford us.
AI is not better than a human. It is faster than a human.
It still means the human to have that critical eye.
Remember I said he gives you the top three diagnosis.
You as the human then have to sort through that and say I
agree with what it's putting his number one, or in this
particular Case, No, you didn't take in consideration that this
dog grew up in Arizona and not New Jersey.
So I also, when I was at University of Illinois, we
talked about what you were talking about, compiling data.
So watching hundreds to thousands of hours of footage, I
guess in this case it would be diagnostic data.
So taking that all over the years, is there a way for
veterinarians to easily do that? Are there programs that exist
now for it or is this all in means of development?
At the moment I'm. Going to say yes, that's not a
cop out. There are programs out there
already and they're called clinical decision systems.
Most of them are in human medicine.
So we have to adapt in the veterinary medicine, but there
are some companies who are optimizing them or developing
for veterinary medicine. And there's some programs which
are just somebody's brainchild right now.
But the fact is, words we used to say, once again showing you
my age, and when I started this, my hair was black.
I never imagined AI other than science fiction when I got out
of veterinary school. Now it's an everyday thing.
So that's 40 some years. OK, those you can add up and you
can get an idea how old I am. Where am I going with this?
Is the fact that what might have taken, let's say, 5 to 10 years
just to make a little change now is happening in 18 months, maybe
even six months. So for me to say that a program
may not be available today doesn't mean it can't be
available in a matter of weeks or months.
So what it took when I graduated from veterinary school, When I
graduated from veterinary school, I was only reading about
ultrasound machines. I went to internship in the
residency in Michigan State and they had to buy their first
ultrasound machine because I said for me to have a residency,
I have to have ultrasound. They didn't have one.
CTI wrote the first article at Michigan State or when I was at
Michigan State on CT, that Michigan State had written on a
veterinary CT and then at Ohio State there was MRI and magnetic
resonance spectroscopy. So each thing was marching on as
I went through my career. So you can say I was kind of
ahead of the pack, but I can also tell you from the time I
went from veterinary school to residency to doing research at
Michigan State, this time was getting compressed.
Things were new, things were happening.
And by the way, I hope everybody knows the 1st CT scanner was
developed by EMI who's the same company that recorded The
Beatles records so. No idea.
Oh my goodness. Yeah, same company.
The time is compressing what's happening.
If you can think of something, you can probably get somebody to
turn it around for you in a very quick period of time.
So clinical decision systems are here, and I think they're going
to be optimized for veterinary medicine.
And those are going to allow us to optimize the treatment of our
pets. And it is going to shorten the
diagnostic time for diseases. It hopefully will also make it
so that more pets can be treated.
So we will increase access to care.
And I just hope people don't decide to charge outlandish
amounts of money for it. I can see it as a really big
tool for making things faster. I have seen our practitioners
been buried in paperwork before trying to reach arts trying to
write their soaps. I'm not sure about AI writing
soaps, but I have heard of some, like some veterinarians will
record their appointments and then the computer will pick it
up and write their soaps for them.
Have you ever seen that before? Yes, there's several programs.
I won't say what the names are, but that actually is a very
practical thing. And depending on how you want to
approach it, it can just be a matter of you talk and it then
uses a large language model to put things into place and it
thinks it should be. Be sure you check your work
because it may not always put things in the right way or as
you're going to, you can say classify this under SOAP,
whatever place you want and it will place things in there for
you. And I think that's a little bit
of a smoother process. But this is, I have had people
using it who tell me that they now get home for dinner with
their family every night. So I think that's a big thing
because it is improving the quality of life for our team
mates. But I just do want to warn you,
I go back to always keep a human in the loop.
And if you're going to have the computer do it for you, that's
great. But just be sure you go back and
look and check. Yes, that's right, that's right.
No, that I don't think we're going to do before you publish
it. Do you have any fear that
veterinarians will become super reliant on AI and almost look to
it to diagnose their patients? I know that AI cannot do
veterinary school for them and I think people need to know
veterinarians vet students. I am tested so often with so
much information and I think the hardest part is for getting
information. It comes back, you know you
review again, it comes back. But I would freaked out if I
type something into a diagnostic platform and it gave me options
and I looked at it in school and I was like oh should it be that?
But I'm leaning towards that. But is that information I
forgot? 1st I'll ask you a question.
Do you think a veterinarian is a regurgitating machine or a
critical thinking machine? I have to say critical thinking
machine correct? Bing Bing, Bing, Bing, you got
that answer right. What you should be trained in
veterinary school is how to use your critical thinking skills.
Critical thinking is so important because we cannot
teach you everything. We have to be able to teach you
how to use your inherent intelligence to come down when
you see something you haven't seen before, to have an idea of
where to go and when. I teach radiology, particularly
to residents, this is the key. Everybody, I tell them when
you're writing your report, the first thing you have to do is
act like a compass. What do I mean?
There we have north-south, east, West.
We want to send the person in the right direction.
So your critical thinking skills are trying to help you get your
compass right as far as north-south, east, West.
Now there's a big sector in that pious where you can be in there.
But if you're going in the right direction, then you'll have time
to refine your information to sort of the GPS coordinates.
But if you're supposed to be going east, but you're really
going West, there's a big difference between the Atlantic
Ocean and the Pacific Ocean. So we don't want that.
So your critical thinking skills first help you go in the right
compass direction, and then you're trying to use those
critical thinking skills to figure out how you refine it to
come down to the GPS coordinates.
If you depend too much on AI, you will lose those critical
thinking skills, and I'm not lying about that.
GPS, what we have in our cars, they say, is causing the portion
of the brain on directions to shrink because so many people
depend on GPS and not their ability to know directions.
Same thing will happen if we depend too much on artificial
intelligence. That's true, I have never been
able to successfully actually read a map.
I think if you dropped me somewhere I could not find my
way home. Yeah, I.
Should just terrify. It.
But wouldn't you rather to know that you were going in the right
topless direction than the opposite one?
Exactly, exactly. I don't want to lose it for
veterinary medicine at all, even though I think people look at it
and they look at these programs and they're like, well, it's a
computer, Shouldn't it be smarter than me?
Doesn't it know more than I could ever know?
And that's exactly what the computers want you to think.
Exactly. If they take over the world, if
we let them. And guess what?
I love computers. I love artificial intelligence.
They taking over my world. Exactly.
It can't replace the veterinary medicine because we're the
compass, as you say, to where we should be going if we're going
in the right direction. But we can use it as a resource
to, you know, make our days go faster, write our notes faster,
and then maybe grab information that we otherwise wouldn't have
put together because there are hundreds of patients a year,
hundreds of cases. We're not going back and
referencing all their old numbers in diagnostics.
Exactly trending the following of subtle changes.
I'm just think about heart disease, Rottweiler, Doberman,
King Charles Spaniel, and if you start following their heart size
early on and the heart size stays normal, you might have
less concern. But if you start seeing the
heart size getting bigger and bigger, I mean subtle, but yes,
constant change, then you're going to say, I think we need to
send Fluffy or Fido or whatever your pet's name in and have a
check and say you can get people to say in the next 6 months I
would like to see an echocardiogram.
What's that do? It means instead of the clients
having to figure out where to get the money it's going to cost
for an Echo in the next 12 hours, they have six months to
plan on this expense that will have such an impact on improving
the care of our pets. Because the clients won't say I
can't afford it, not necessarily.
At least they might say, OK, I can put a few dollars away each
week so that our pet here can get their Echo here in six
months. So that's one of the ways it can
help. It can help us plan for medical
procedures that are necessary. That goes into my next question
actually. It was about how could AI help
with veterinary care in underserved communities as well,
so adding more time to the table.
Can you think of anything else? Are there any programs that
could help people who could maybe not afford veterinary
care? Well, if we'll start off with
the fact that by us becoming more efficient, we can see more
pets and part of the efficiency of any business because remember
we're talking about veterinarians or small business
owners. How can we make it so that
veterinarians margins are better?
And you know, you have basically three ways that you can improve
margins. You can increase the price, you
could decrease the cost of what it is you purchase, or you can
make what you do more efficient. So if we can make things more
efficient, you don't have to raise the price or go to a
cheaper product. So by doing it, hopefully
veterinary medicine will become affordable and reachable to more
people and you'd be able to see instead of seeing one patient
every 15 minutes, you will feel comfortable seeing a patient
every 10 minutes. Notice I said comfortable
because I'm not trying to cram people in there.
But part of that's efficiency. And you already brought up the
describe in the exam room. That's one of the ways so that
when you're through with the exam, everything has been
scribed. All you have to do is check it
over. And that includes, let's say you
have a pet who came in with AGI upset and you figure let's try a
bland diet on them. You can also say please include
brand diet in release documents. It's already done.
So it can make it so that veterinary medicine can be more
efficient and therefore available.
Also, the diagnostic tools, let's say you, as long as your
clients will accept this, let's say the pet is scanned as it
comes in the door and you just know your pet has been rubbing
their eyes and whatnot, but your pet was scamming.
It came the door and the AI programs putting in here, These
are things we might consider this pet and glaucoma is one of
them. So before you even go in the
room, you're considering the fact that this pet may have
glaucoma. So you can now do have the
appropriate tests, you can more efficiently bring it done.
You probably can even have it so that you're, if somebody on your
veterinary team, your veterinary technician or technologist can
actually do the ocular pressures for you.
So when you come in there and say, OK, we'll see what the
problem is, you're looking at the red eyes and we've confirmed
your pet has glaucoma. But it's early enough.
When we can do something, we're going to try and bring the
pressures down medically. So that's one of the ways.
And I'm not talking about science fiction.
I'm talking about the tools that are available today.
But we need to get them in the hands of veterinarians.
I do not feel that a virtual VCPR is ready today, but imagine
we have a pet who may have a cardiac problem or even a
seizure problem, and you have a body sensor on them so that the
family knows there's a sign that Fluffy is having a problem right
now. We need to get them in.
Or you may even get a call from your veterinary team saying
we're noticing that Fluffy's having cardiac arrhythmias, and
why don't we schedule you for an appointment tonight if that's
good for you. And the client may say, can we
do it tomorrow morning? From what we're seeing right
here, Fluffy's doing good. But yeah, come on in.
Tomorrow morning, we'll have a spot for you.
So you see, that veterinary health care team is using that
AI and that transponder system, and the family's good because
they know now that everybody's going back to the office for
work. Their pet is still being
observed even when they're not there.
I think I've heard of that a little bit in large animal
medicine. So they'll have cattle swallow.
It's like a massive pill and it just sits.
You know what I'm talking about. Yes, there is a name for.
It what is that? Dairy medicine is probably the
most advanced form of Tele of yeah, telemedicine that we have
in veterinary medicine. Not only will they be managed
managing and monitoring what's happening, going on with the
rumen, but they're able to see what's their gait like, what's
their body weight like, what's their milk production.
They can identify if mastitis is showing up long before we can
spot it. So you can treat it earlier, get
it cleared up really quickly. And they've been doing this for
over 10 years. So AI in dairy medicine will
probably be in Mars before we are.
Dairy medicine is amazing. I remember when I learned about
them separating sperm cells and that blew my mind because then
human medicine took their technology and started using it,
not for the same purpose, but I think for like Cancer Research.
That's what I've heard. Just a whole sort of things,
because dairy medicine, it's so much further ahead.
Right. Agriculture has always been on
the cutting edge of basically science, not just medicine.
And veterinary medicine is one of the places it has made.
It has allowed dairy to become an extremely efficient business
by using these tools that we have now.
And on top of that, one veterinarian can oversee
thousands of cows, multiple farms from their office.
And you don't the veterinarian doesn't even have to be looking
at because they'll have a team member today such and such as
monitoring these. And they're calling the
veterinarian saying we're having a problem on farm #26.
Just such a broad scope. It's interesting thinking about
like animals potentially having like dairy.
Kettle already have them monitors on them for health.
And are there ways to regulate to know that AI is actually
catching the right things in these animals?
Or I guess that's where the veterinarians come in.
That's where the veterinarians coming in.
We have to be sure that somebody's checking and say yes,
this looks reason more this dad is going skew even there's a new
disease showing up or something not right being picked up.
So you've heard me say it at least twice or anytime.
Just going to go back keep the human in the loop.
I mean, I'm a radiologist. We use AI to help diagnose
things. But here's the thing.
Human medicine is spending hundreds of millions, if not
billions of dollars to develop artificial intelligence,
veterinary medicine. We're spending hundreds of
thousands, maybe millions of dollars to develop it.
So it's not parody in what's being spent.
But in human medicine, we cannot have an algorithm, say, examine
the brain and another algorithm examine the skull, another
algorithm examine the heart and the body of so an algorithm for
each body part. In veterinary medicine, we're
trying to make one algorithm that can evaluate the whole
body, but realize dogs have 50 different body composition
variations where people, and yes, this is oversimplification,
but imagine people who have small and medium and large.
So why is it they can't do that in human medicine, but we're
dealing in veterinary medicine? That's one of the places you
need to keep an eye on those folks who are doing this because
it's not going to work. You're going to put a bias in
there for that German Shepherd that doesn't match that
dachshund vertebral heart scores.
One of the reasons that many people started to mistrust it is
because they were built for something like a Beagle and was
telling us that Belgium Mahuwahs all had big hearts.
Well, no, Belgium Mahuwah is a unique talk in itself.
So that's why I like trending. You take information from that
same pet and it trends from that pet.
So if it starts changing from today, in over six months, a
year, you see it change. You know it's what's happening
inside that pet, so there's different ways of addressing it.
Answering your questions or mine.
Just rambling. You are giving the best answers
ever. I am learning so much.
Actually, I wanted to talk about a point you made earlier.
So you were talking about the kids playing with drones and
you're like, those would make great veterinarians.
It makes me think a lot about diversity in the field because a
lot of people I go to vet school with, we had similar
backgrounds, like we grew up with animals.
I grew up on a very small horse farm, even though I'm in the
suburbs of Saint Louis. So my goals are like mixed
animal and also relief work around the world, dabbling in
everything, including leadership.
And a lot of people are like me. Do you think this AI, in
bringing technology into veterinary medicine, could make
more people want to become veterinarians from all sorts of
backgrounds? I think we have to let those
folks who are tech savvy know that they have the skills to
become a veterinarian. What used to be required to be a
veterinarian and this is even before your time is you grew up
in a dairy farm, you're going to become a veterinarian.
Now it's a matter of are you tech savvy?
Can we teach you because what what a veterinarian needs to do?
We don't know. Just think about the fact 1992
New York City people were dying of an undiagnosed encephalitis.
A veterinarian at the Bronx Zoo, a veterinary pathologist,
recognized that there were wild birds dying in her zoo and that
her collection was starting to show signs of an encephalitis
and she had a suspicion. She took samples.
She sent them to the CDC for confirmation.
The CDC told her we do not process veterinary samples.
Luckily, she was a very persistent woman.
She sent samples to several places, including some people
she knew in the military as well as Davis, and said, these are my
suspicions, Would you please confirm?
And it came back with a novel encephalitis virus.
That was when West Nile disease was first diagnosed in the
United States. And then she contacted the New
York Health Department and said, I think you need to check
everybody that you're seeing for West Nile disease.
And here's my confirmation. Now, if you read some of the
things, he'll talk about how the the human physicians diagnosed
West Nile disease. They did.
But it was with the the really the efforts of a veterinarian
that it became possible. Why am I saying that?
Because people do not expect that a veterinarian was the one
that probably saved lots of people's lives because she was
persistent, saw something from a zoonotic disease that was not
reported in the United States and pursued it.
That's what we need. Veterinarians who are going to
step out of what is the typical path and be persistent and
realize that they may be the only ones that have that site,
that forward site for what's happening.
This could reach underrepresented students and
people with new ways of thinking.
Not just you grew up on a farm, you grew up with animals, you
would make a good veterinarian instead.
Maybe they don't have as much animal experience, but they know
the welfare metrics and their tech savvy at the same time.
Correct. So who was an underrepresented
individual today? Be honest, it's men.
Very true. They attract more men into the
profession because we need people who are interested in
those or other types of things. I don't know, there may be
something different tomorrow, but until I went to this drone
competition, it didn't strike me.
This is a perfectly fertile area to try and get people interested
in veterinary medicine because of their tech skills.
So and. Majority of the tech industry
are dominated by men. It just is.
And so that might bring some of the numbers back because the
trend of it being, let's see, is the profession 80% women now. 80
to 85, yeah, that's graduating. But you see, it's not even
bringing them back. It's a matter of showing them
there's a crossover industry here for you.
So do what you're doing, but bring it over to us.
And with more diversity in the field, there's just there's so
much more brought to the table too.
Diversity leads to innovation. Fortune 500 companies have
proved that if they have non diverse workforce versus a
diverse workforce, the workforce has divorced.
The workforce that is diverse is 30% more innovative. 30% Wow.
That's incredible. So what voices do you think need
to be included in these conversations about bringing
more technology into veterinary medicine?
The general public, youth, current adults, if they want to
look into it and try. I think it might you, there are
some schools doing, I think the schools because really this is
where it starts. It starts at the schools saying,
OK, just because this is the way we've been doing it for the last
50 years, isn't the main way mean that we need to keep doing
it that way for the next 50 years.
So they need to look at and say, what is it we're trying to
attract? We're trying to attract
diversity of thought, diversity of mind.
How do we find that? Well, we always go over here.
Farm shows going on in Pennsylvania right now.
Great. Here you can see horses, cows,
sheep, goats, go to that robotics fair, go to that drone
fair, talk to people, try and get them interested.
We have to go to places that we haven't traditionally gone
before. That's really what it comes down
to. I have learned a lot from this
talk, not only about what technology can do for us, but
also like what we can do for it and how much time it saves.
I really see lifestyle changes because of AI coming into
veterinary medicine and also the ability to catch cases so much
quicker in advance is the best form of medicine.
I mean, is what I've learned so far is preventative medicine.
Correct. Preventative medicine, I'm going
to pick one particular organ of the body and say we don't do
enough and it could probably have a big impact and that's the
mouth. Dental.
If we did more preventative medicine on dental disease, we
would most likely reduce cardiac disease, renal disease, liver
disease, and cancer. It's one organ of the body.
I think AI can help us do a much better job on dental disease.
That's just one example, there's others.
But if we were going to concentrate on one thing, I'd
say concentrate on AI and dental disease and you would have such
a big impact. That's amazing.
I actually I saw at our orthodontist, like I went back
in to get a retainer and they had this, it almost looked like
a flashlight, like a scope, and they took it inside the mouth
and then on the screen it appeared a scan of your teeth
that it had like drawn up. And my first thought was, wow,
we do not have that in the veterinary clinic.
If you could scan their mouth, which for most pets, I mean
normally you look at their dentition when you have an exam,
but if there were logs of it, the difference that you could
make in the future would be absolutely amazing.
Yeah, but realize that most of your dental disease is
subjingible. So if we can have a radio
graphic examination of the roots, the subjingible portion
of the teeth and had AI do a quick evaluation, that's what
you want to follow. And then set up a good hygiene
program. So that pet who nails living to
1012, maybe 15 years may be able to live to 15/18/20 years of
age. And we need to remind people
that we do have a lot of pets. Just think about the African
grey parrot who I've had one who's been passed down through
three wills. But we, we want our pets are a
vital part of our family and we probably go through multiple
pets in our family just because their life spans have been
shorter and should I say shortened.
And I think there's things we can do to make it so that they
do have a longer, healthier life.
And I I know that technology is part of what's going to do it.
So I have one last question for you.
What do you hope to see in the future of veterinary medicine
and AI technology? We're just in the field in
general. And how do you do that as AVMA
President? Big question and a short time to
answer it. Well, you know, we've kind of
been hitting it diversity, if we can help everybody understand
that their unique, their uniqueness can contribute to the
healthcare of the world. Cause I've already said how
veterinarians are so important in One Health.
And remember, we've been talking about medical practice, but
veterinarians are so important in public health.
They're important in research. I'm hoping that we can use AI so
that we can reach out to more people and help everybody know
how important they are. I have six months left in my
presidency and totaled 18 months left on the ABMA board of
directors. So I'm doing everything I can to
be a loud voice, but there's so much that we all need to do.
And part of that is it's like the reason I went to the
reservation was I wanted to know what they're doing and how we
can interact with them. Not how we can necessarily give
them something, but how what they're doing can give us.
And that's when, I'll be honest, I learned something about what
kids are into today. You know, I every time I say
kids or youngsters, I say, Oh my God, how old am I?
But it's really we're, we're talking about teenagers, people
younger than you. I know I'm 23.
I still feel like I'm 16, but I'm not.
I'm an adult. I'm not convinced yet.
You continue to think that you're 16.
That's great. But what I'm saying is we need
to use technology to reach people of all ages.
So it's not just the 16 year old, but it's the 60 or the 90
year old. Technology can help us to do
that. And in doing that, we can help
healthcare be more available to the general public.
That's amazing. I am very excited for your last
six months of your presidency. I am sad that I only got to meet
you in your last six months, but I am sticking around with Savma
for a while, so hopefully I'll see you right a lot.
I'll just say to the podcast, thank you all so much for
listening to the amazing Doctor Bailey AVMA President.
I certainly have learned a lot, and I hope you have too.