Becoming a veterinary cardiologist

In a recent discussion about his career, Jonathan Goodwin, DVM, MS, DACVIM (Cardiology), shared insights into what his career path was like to becoming a cardiologist, plus he explained more about what he considers his greatest career fulfillment, helping pets breathe easier and reassuring their humans.

Transcript

dvm360: Starting with your name, can you tell me a little but about yourself?

Jonathan Goodwin, DVM, MS, DACVIM (Cardiology): I'm a veterinary cardiologist, originally from Detroit, Michigan. Go Lions, Go Red Wings, Go Pistons, Go Tigers. Straight ticket, Detroit. I have been doing veterinary cardiology since 2008 and just enjoying it every day.

dvm360: What inspired you to become a cardiologist?

Goodwin: In vet school, you start learning there's so many different specialties, there's so many different things you can do. I always had interest in the heart and the brain. I loved them both and in school, I saw that you could go and specialize. So I took the opportunity to spend a little bit more time in each section to see if there was one that really fit with me, and I really like the brain stuff, but I would work all day with the cardiology patients and feel like I was working. So I was like, Yeah, this is a place to be, right here.

dvm360: In your time as a cardiologist, what is would you say the most common misconception that pet owners have about veterinary cardiology?

Goodwin: I would say the most common misconception is, if [my pet has] a heart problem, that means my animal is about to die. I think that's the most common. That's the biggest issue we deal with a lot of fear, where there's a lot of different things that can happen with your heart that really won't negatively affect lifespan if dealt with appropriately.

But again, of course, there are those things that can be pretty scary, because I think everybody understands heart attack. They know of someone, or heard of someone that's had a heart attack. And so that's a big, big fear that their baby is going to have a heart attack, and they're going to lose them fast.

dvm360: Do you have a most rewarding moment from your career as a cardiologist that you would like to share?

Goodwin: I think I get rewarded anytime I get with an owner, and we make a plan to see if we can get their baby better, their heart functioning better, and then we recheck them in 3 months or 4 months or 6 months, and they got better. I'm like, Yes, done. We got them, you know. And so that's always rewarding.

dvm360: What are the subtle red flags owners might miss at home when it comes to heart disease, and how can veterinary professionals educate them on what to look out for?

Goodwin: Good question, and number one, I would say, is if they're ever get a chance to watch the sleeping breathing rate, how fast they breathe while they're sleeping. The reason why I say while they're sleeping is because it takes a lot of the other things out of the picture. If there's pain, usually you're not in pain while you sleep. If there's anxiety, usually you're not anxious when you're asleep. So it gives them an idea of what's going on but what's tough is in most animals, heart disease can look like they're just getting older, not always a little bit more tired, doesn't have quite [the power] to get up. And so that's kind of the trick that we're always watching for.

A lot ends up falling on the veterinarians and because heart disease is fairly common, a lot of veterinarians will hear a heart murmur. So we want to make sure that you're doing the right thing. We don't just say, hear it and say, Okay, we watch it, meaning we don't do anything you want to. You hear a heart murmur? Oh, let's get a chest X ray and see if there's any changes going on with the heart. If there are, we can move forward and kind of see if they hear an arrhythmia. Oh, let's get an electrocardiogram to see what that arrhythmia is. Once we know what it is that we can move forward if there is anything else that needs to be done.

So this kind of the at-home phase and then the General Practitioner phase.

dvm360: Any owner who's just received a difficult diagnosis for their pet, what is a piece of advice you'd give them to help them process the news and then also move forward?

Goodwin: So if I have to give a difficult diagnosis to say, ‘Listen, you know, your baby's in a spot that we don't want them to stay in. This can be dangerous for lifespan. We always have a couple of choices.’ And what I've noticed is often people will say, How long do they have? What do we think prognosis wise, in terms of length and time?

With cardiology, what I say to them is, instead of focusing on that length of time, I would try to focus in on treating the problem. If we put our efforts into fighting, then it's not a thing of, oh, well, how long do I have? The analogy I've used many times is if we're in a room and the walls are closing in and we're just like, soon it's going to be over. You're miserable that whole time. Or else, we can say, Listen, that wall's trying to close in. Let's all get together and push that thing backwards, so we don't go out like that. It's a different mentality, mentality to fight, fight the disease instead of being fatalistic about the disease.

So that's what I'm always encouraging them to do. I said, Look, we can't we don't have ultimate control over what's going to end up happening, but we do have control over every choice that we make, and every decision we have that could have been making this baby worse, and choices we can make to make them better. And if we do those things and focusing on that, let's reevaluate in 3 months, 4 months, and see and if we're better than we were, then we don't have to stay in the sad spot we get to the good spot we want to be.

If you're not happy with yourself and you're 400 pounds and you can say, I'm at risk of heart attack and diabetes, that definitely can be the case. But it doesn't mean you have to stay there and if we don't stay there, we don't have to play there, and we don't have to play there, we can go where we want to be.