Science can be frustrating. There is always a gap between having a great idea and having a new tool to change things in the real world. Ideally, that gap is bridged by robust, rigorous scientific research that tells us whether the original idea is really as great as it seems and what it will actually let us accomplish. Even in the best case, filling the gap between inspiration and real-world change takes time. And all too often, seemingly good ideas crack under the pressure of scientific investigation and fail to live up to their promise.

Our natural human tendency is to let our excitement over a new discovery or hypothesis carry us away and start implementing our new ideas as quickly as possible. If we're lucky, that lets us achieve the change we want to make in the world more quickly. Unfortunately, in most cases the result is less positive. Skipping past the process of interrogating new hypotheses scientifically commonly leaves us with tools that don't work or that have harmful effects we didn't anticipate. Nature is inevitably more complex that our ideas about it, and enthusiasm can't overcome the gap between what we think we understand and the reality of the natural world.

A necessary evil

In veterinary medicine, we are always seeking new understandings and new tools to better care for our patients. Compared to our colleagues in human medicine, we are relatively unconstrained in trying out our ideas. As I discussed in my last column, regulatory oversight of veterinary medicine is light, and we are accustomed to therapies with little supporting evidence and to leaping into new practices well before they have built the kind of supportive evidence required in human medicine.

This is a necessary evil given the limited resources available to build better evidence in veterinary medicine. When our ideas turn out to be right, we have the advantage of getting effective treatments to our patients faster and with less cost than in human medicine. When we are wrong, of course, we end up exposing our patients to therapies that seem like they should work, but are actually ineffective (e.g. tramadol, glucosamine, homeopathy) or harmful (e.g. high-dose steroids for spinal cord injury, treatment of asymptomatic bacteriuria with antibiotics).