Dr. Rebekah Zahedi spotlights Fear Free care in new podcast
Bottom line
Fear Free care is getting fresh attention through a new All Things Veterinary podcast episode from Patterson Veterinary featuring Dr. Rebekah Zahedi, a small animal veterinarian and executive leader at My Pets Wellness. The episode focuses on reducing fear, anxiety, and stress during veterinary visits, with practical discussion around in-clinic handling, improving the feline experience, and setting pets up for calmer care. The topic aligns with a broader, well-established Fear Free framework that asks practices to address not just restraint technique, but also client education, staff training, facility design, leadership, and patient flow. (podcasts.apple.com)
Why it matters: For veterinary professionals, this isn’t just a conversation about bedside manner. Fear, anxiety, and stress can affect exam quality, patient safety, team injury risk, client adherence, and whether pet parents come back for future care. In cats especially, stress around transport, waiting rooms, and handling remains a major barrier to routine visits, and current feline guidelines emphasize adapting the environment and handling plan to the individual patient rather than forcing completion of the visit at any cost. Fear Free resources also continue to normalize pre-visit pharmaceuticals as one tool for safer, more successful appointments. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
What to watch: Expect continued emphasis on teamwide protocols, feline-specific workflow changes, and wider use of pre-visit medication and “happy visits” as practices look for practical ways to reduce stress without slowing care delivery. (fearfree.com)
Fear Free care is back in the spotlight with a new All Things Veterinary podcast episode from Patterson Veterinary featuring Dr. Rebekah Zahedi, who discusses stress and anxiety in clinic patients, ways to improve feline visits, and broader strategies for more humane, lower-stress care. While the episode itself is educational rather than regulatory or commercial news, it lands at a moment when many practices are still trying to balance patient welfare, staff safety, efficiency, and pet parent expectations in increasingly busy clinics. (podcasts.apple.com)
The conversation builds on a model that has steadily moved from niche behavior-focused medicine into general practice operations. Fear Free’s veterinary practice certification standards call for implementation across culture and leadership, client education, staff training, the physical facility, and patient visits, reflecting a shift away from seeing low-stress handling as a single technician skill and toward treating it as a whole-practice system. (fearfree.com)
That broader system matters because the barriers to calmer visits often start well before the exam room. Fear Free educational materials emphasize preparing pet parents and patients before arrival, including transport planning, treat-based conditioning, and, when appropriate, pre-visit pharmaceuticals. The organization’s guidance specifically frames those medications as a way to reduce fear and create a more positive veterinary experience, not simply to make restraint easier. (fearfree.com)
Dr. Zahedi’s focus on feline experience is especially timely. The 2022 AAFP/ISFM Cat Friendly Veterinary Interaction Guidelines and companion environment guidelines stress species-specific handling, individualized interaction plans, and environmental controls such as visual barriers, quieter spaces, and minimizing exposure to stressful stimuli. Those guidelines also reflect an important practical point for clinics: feline distress is not just a handling problem at the moment of restraint, but a workflow problem that can begin with the carrier, the car ride, the lobby, and the exam table. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
Industry commentary around Fear Free and low-stress care has become more pragmatic in recent years. Coverage from dvm360 has highlighted how feline-friendly approaches can improve outcomes for cats, clients, and veterinary teams, while Fear Free’s own podcast and training materials increasingly focus on concrete tools such as treat ladders, communication scripts, and team coordination rather than ideology alone. In other words, the discussion has matured from whether low-stress care matters to how practices can operationalize it consistently. (fearfree.com)
Why it matters: For veterinary teams, Fear Free care has implications well beyond patient comfort. Lower-stress visits can improve the quality of physical exams, reduce the need to abandon procedures, support better diagnostics, and strengthen client trust and follow-through. For feline medicine in particular, reducing visit-related stress may help address one of the longstanding reasons pet parents delay or avoid care. The operational challenge is that success depends on consistency: reception, technicians, doctors, scheduling, room setup, and discharge all have to support the same goal. (pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
There’s also a workforce angle. As clinics look for ways to improve retention and reduce burnout, low-stress handling protocols can help teams feel safer and more in control, especially with patients that have a history of fear, anxiety, or aggression. Fear Free’s certification model and training materials suggest that emotional wellbeing should be documented and managed as part of routine medical care, an approach that may resonate with practices trying to standardize care quality across multiple doctors or locations. (fearfree.com)
What to watch: The next phase is likely to be less about awareness and more about adoption. Watch for practices to formalize feline-specific workflows, expand use of pre-visit medication protocols, and integrate emotional health markers into the medical record, especially as pet parents become more aware of low-stress options and compare clinics on experience as well as medicine. (fearfree.com)