Member Profile: Dr. Bob Larson

After graduating from veterinary college and finishing a PhD program I became actively engaged in private practice emphasizing work with beef cattle. Many of my clients posed questions that sent me searching for answers. Most of the questions seemed innocent enough, such as “why do we do it that way?”, “how much will that help?”, “that seems expensive, how much benefit will that provide?” and other similarly valid demands on my expertise.

At about this time I vented some of my frustrations with finding answers to such seemingly simple and appropriate questions to a colleague (Dr. Lisa Tokach), and she advised me to subscribe to a newsletter from the Washington State University Field Disease Investigation Unit edited by Dale Hancock and Susan Holler. Each issue of the newsletter spoke directly to questions I was encountering in daily practice and it renewed my interest in clinical epidemiology and critical thinking that had been lying dormant for some time. Other mentors such as Drs. Louis Perino and Steve Henry emerged that continued to challenge me to dig deeper into the literature and available evidence to find the best answers for my clients.

In 1996 I took an academic position with the University of Missouri and was given the opportunity to write some textbook chapters and review articles. In this role I found that in some textbook and review articles, statements of fact were not backed up with references to any primary data or when I retrieved the primary articles, the primary data and conclusions of the researchers did not concur with the interpretation spun by the textbook or review article author. This experience began to cause cynicism to creep into my view of traditional methods of veterinary teaching and continuing education.

Then a few years ago, I happened to come across a book on evidence based medicine (EBM) written by Sackett, Straus, Richardson, Rosenberg, and Haynes – which then led to a buying spree on Amazon.com to get a hold of more books on EBM and clinical epidemiology. I wore out a few highlighters marking each statement that seemed to answer many of the challenges I had faced in clinical practice and came to the conclusion that the pioneers of EBM had harnessed clinical epidemiology in a way that not only captivated my quantitative bent, but also tied it to teaching and continuing education in a way that would greatly benefit veterinary medicine.

Others in veterinary medicine must have been traveling paths that led them to similar convictions because I received information about an evidence based veterinary medicine symposium to be held at Mississippi State University. I attended that symposium in May 2004 and found a number of others who also saw great possibilities for applying the principles of EBM to veterinary medicine and were willing to invest some time and effort into seeing if an association would be possible and beneficial. Since that time, a small group of people formed a steering committee and I was fortunate to be elected the chair and efforts were begun to lay the groundwork for the current EBVMA.

Drs. Stanley Robertson, Roy Montgomery, and Cory Langston began making plans for the 2nd Symposium on Evidence-Based Veterinary Medicine which was held in June 2006. At the 2nd Symposium, a constitution and bylaws for the Evidence-Based Veterinary Medicine Association was approved, and an association to champion the ideals of EBVM was born.

I am now back at my alma mater of Kansas State University and I am finding many opportunities to weave EBVM into veterinary and graduate teaching and research; and I work daily with practitioners striving to integrate EBVM into daily practice. I am very proud to be involved with the EBVMA and encourage anyone with an interest in promoting excellence in veterinary medicine to support and assist this great association.