Sometimes in medicine, where there is so much that we don’t know, it’s pretty easy to get trapped in the familiar–stick with the drugs and dosing we know, run the tests we’ve run before, assume that if a disease hasn’t been reported in our area before we aren’t going to see it. The familiar might be a comfortable place, but it is also a deceptively dangerous place. Clinging to what we think we know or the way we’ve always done something limits us and, in the case of medical practitioners, might damage (or at least not optimally benefit) our patients.

I spent this afternoon learning about diseases I thought I knew and diseases I’ve never met. Equine piroplasmosis, a tick-borne disease, is considered an exotic disease in the U.S. I’ve never seen a case and don’t know anyone who has, so I might have been tempted to skip a talk on treatments for the condition. I’m glad, though, that I didn’t. I had no idea (well, I suppose I might have learned it for a mid-term once) that imidocarb, the standard treatment, causes severe colic signs in horses. So, of course, I didn’t know that pre-medication with another drug such as atropine or glycopyrrolate can mitigate those signs. Well, if piroplasmosis isn’t endemic to my state, will I ever need to know? Here’s the answer–once upon a time, West Nile virus was considered an exotic disease