615. Veterinary Dentistry in Yangon, Myanmar

"I don't believe that there is not one vet who uses the dental ultrasonic machine to scale the dogs' teeth in Myanmar," I said to my ex-assistant who had worked for me for 3 years as a Veterinary Technician. He is qualified as a vet in Myanmar and can open his own practice.

"I have visited the pet shops and veterinary clinics in May," my assistant said. "Only manual scaling is done," he said. Yangon now has over 40 vet clinics like Singapore and it is a growth city with property prices shooting up.

As my assistant is a sincere and honest person, I will not doubt his statement. In this situation, a vet with an ultrasonic dental scaler will be at a competitive advantage.

As he said he would be opening his own clinic in Yangon, I presented him my existing dental scaling machine and ordered a new one today Saturday. He would be at the Airport at 7 am today.

Finally he has decided to strike out on his own as he had been offered to join another Myanmar vet to jointly run a practice. However, nothing materialised since he left me in April 2011. It had been 5 months and the opening of this practice might be in December 2011. Something happened in between.

"If you concentrate on doing one thing, you will succeed," he said to me yesterday when I visited him at Peninsula Plaza. "You fall down, get up, do again and again till you succeed." What he meant was "focus" on veterinary medicine and surgery and not be distracted and you will succeed in practice. Work long hours too, I would say as clients want you to be available as this is a personalised business.

I am most happy for him as he had 3 years of hands-on experience at Toa Payoh Vets and had been willing to learn. He had been a good hard working colleague and had seen most common cases and the emergency anaesthetic problems.

I know he will do well in Yangon. I know he has a passion for veterinary medicine because of one incident: my printer cartridge runs out of ink fast despite my printer output of less than 50 printed pages per month. He had been using it to download veterinary info from the internet.

One year later, I should know how he is doing. I still can't believe that the most famous and experienced vet in Yangon does not have an ultrasonic dental scaler. It is expensive, costing over $3,000 in Singapore. Also, there is no isoflurane gas + oxygen machine being used by the vets there. It costs around $5,000 in Singapore for the basic set.

There may be good reasons for not having such sets in Myanmar.