Will Falconer, DVM Moderator
You know, Caroline, I appreciate this vet's stance! He's being conservative with testing, and while a test doesn't hurt anything (depending on what you do with the results, as always), I see people over reliant on blood chemistry testing as an assessment of health. Some even do it yearly. That's excessive, in my mind.
Better is to keep a journal. Study up on symptoms, those natural 'red flags' that tell us something is amiss. Homeopaths are trained to do this and can often catch disorders before they become serious diseases and well before a blood sample would reveal a disease. As you journal about your animal, you can learn a lot, and reading back over it, can often pick up trends. If you opt to hire a homeopathic vet with this information, you're likely to save your animal a lot of suffering. [It occurs to me that there needs to be a Part Two to this article: What are drugs doing to your animal? It sure isn't called cure]
Here's a page that can be of use to get a handle on just what are symptoms. Lots that a homeopath sees that would conventionally be called "normal."