Dr David The Vet

06/08/2026

The most frustrating part of this job has nothing to do with sick animals. It is watching a client get a claim declined when they were certain they were covered.

Two things trip people up more than anything else. The fine print, sublimits and a per condition excess that quietly cap what you actually get back. And timing, because the moment you take out a policy later in life or switch to a cheaper one, anything your pet has already shown signs of becomes an existing condition. That itchy ear from two years ago. The knee you mentioned once. Gone.

The reason I care is simple. When a pet is well insured, my job changes completely. I can reach for the bloods, the scan, the referral, the surgery, and give that animal a real shot without the whole thing stalling over money. That financial weight does not just sit on the owner. It sits on us too.

Understand your policy before you need to lean on it. General information only, not financial advice.

24/07/2026

13/07/2026

I have been a vet for over a decade and I still feel like a fraud some days.

I assumed it would fade with experience. It has not, it just got quieter, and it took me an embarrassingly long time to work out why. The knowledge gap that fuels the feeling never fully closes. It just moves. In year one it was the vet in the next consult room. Now it is the specialist replying to my referral letters. Every vet I have ever admired turned out to be looking up at someone too.

For a long time I thought this meant something was wrong with me. Then I found the data. In an international survey of 941 practising vets, 68 per cent met the clinical cut-off for imposter syndrome, with under five years in practice one of the strongest risk factors (Kogan et al. 2020). Around a third of veterinary faculty still meet the threshold. I was never the minority. Neither are you.

The reframe that changed things for me was this. The perception was accurate. As a new grad I genuinely did know less than the colleague next door. My error was the conclusion, treating that gap as evidence of fraud rather than evidence of being early on a curve everyone else was also once on. My competence was building from my first consult. My confidence took months longer, sometimes years. Nobody told me that lag was normal, or that it had an exit.

Looking back, the feeling itself never hurt my patients. The behaviours it drove nearly did. Not asking for help. Over-working cases to compensate. Rereading my notes at midnight looking for the mistake I was sure I had made. The one thing I got right, mostly by luck, was asking early, and having a mentor who let me be wrong safely. The research calls the first year a make or break period (Gilling and Parkinson 2009). That was the difference for me.

So if year one feels like this, you are not failing. You are doing it exactly the way I did.

Part 2 covers what I actually use against the feeling.

Refs: Kogan et al. 2020, Vet Record. Gilling and Parkinson 2009, JVME.