Health considerations for pregnant and postpartum veterinary professionals
Emily Singler, VMD, shares the details of her book coming out to address this topic and offers a look into her research
When expecting her first child, Emily Singler, VMD, couldn't find any resources available for pregnant or postpartum women in veterinary medicine. In fact, even her healthcare provider didn't have answers.
In a dvm360® interview, Singler shares that this inspired her to take it upon herself to write the book Pregnancy and Postpartum Considerations for the Veterinary Team, which is currently available for preorder. She highlights some main points in the comprehensive book, including insight on physical and mental health considerations for pregnant or postpartum veterinary professionals.
The following is a partial transcript of the video.
Emily Singler, VMD: Throughout all my pregnancies, I can remember going on Amazon and just Googling 'Pregnancy book for vets.' And, there never was one. So just over time, the idea gradually grew. At first I thought maybe I'll make a handout or a pamphlet, or maybe I'll just make a webpage. From there, when I thought about everything that needed to go into it, I just knew it needed to be more than that. So, I just decided to write the book, so that other people would have easier access and more reliable information to make their own decisions off of.
There are a lot of [physical health concerns for pregnant and postpartum women]. So, kind of broad categories, which most everything in the book, it kind of ties back to how working in veterinary medicine affects the mind and the body and pregnancy. So in the first half of the book, we talk about how a lot of the physical workplace hazards, infectious disease, drug and chemical exposure, radiation, anesthesia, stress and fatigue, injuries, all the things that are just kind of normal workplace hazards for veterinary professionals, how those can affect fertility, how they can affect pregnancy, how they can affect lactation, if that applies. So, there are a lot of those.
And then we also talk about all the normal kind of changes that happen in the body during pregnancy, there's a lot of fatigue, there's a lot more blood that the body has to pump, there's changes in [the] center of gravity, changes in the laxity of ligaments and muscles that can affect our propensity for injury, and stress and strain and that kind of thing.
