AS an attending physician at U.C.L.A., I see a wide variety of maladies. But I also consult occasionally at the Los Angeles Zoo, where the veterinarians’ rounds are strikingly similar to those I conduct with my physician colleagues. Intrigued by the overlap, I began making careful notes of the conditions I came across by day in my human patients. At night, I combed veterinary databases and journals for their correlates, asking myself a simple question: “Do animals get [fill in the disease]?” I started with the big killers. Do animals get breast cancer? Stress-induced heart attacks? Brain tumors? How about shingles and gout? Fainting spells? Night after night, condition after condition, the answer kept coming back “yes.” My research yielded a series of fascinating commonalities.
I also discovered that geese, gorillas and sea lions grieve and may become depressed. Shelties, Weimaraners and other dog breeds are prone to anxiety disorders.
Suddenly, I began to reconsider my approach to mental illness, a field I had studied during the psychiatric residency I completed before turning to cardiology. Perhaps a human patient compulsively burning himself with cigarettes could improve if his therapist consulted a bird specialist experienced in the treatment of parrots with feather-picking disorder. Significantly for substance abusers and addicts, species from birds to elephants are known to seek out psychotropic berries and plants that change their sensory states — that is, get them high.
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