As an MD who is the son of a DVM: Dad had his interests (hip dysplasia and veterinary orthopaedics) but was comfortable with pretty much everything including d

As an MD who is the son of a DVM: Dad had his interests (hip dysplasia and veterinary orthopaedics) but was comfortable with pretty much everything including dentistry, most surgery and internal medicine. Newer DVMs do specialize somewhat in the sense that they tend to adopt more limited scopes of practice. There are even some that don't do spays and neuters which would have horrified my late father; those and vaccinations were the business bread and butter. Veterinary HMOs and PPOs are still a small part of the market and Dad never took them or completed claim forms for clients, but they're growing. When I was in general practice I had a fair number of fee-for-service and cash pay patients (most were Medicaid/dual Medi-Medi and some HMO-PPO, but not the overwhelming majority), and I had the list of the (then) $4 drugs at the local supermarket pharmacies and we used that like a formulary to keep their out-of-pocket costs down. I'd say about a third of my patients were pediatric, the rest adults, and a smattering of prenatal. However, by modern standards even though we're trained to do it in family medicine I don't think many family practice physicians do full-scope because of the liability, particularly for prenatal care. I'm not in general care anymore, though I still see patients intermittently. Veterinarians may have been more like yesterday's primary care a decade ago, but I'd argue that's increasingly no longer true.