08/05/2022
Dr. Bo Brock. Lamesa TX
Navicular
Since I first became a veterinarian I have hated this disease in horses and my goal has always been to defeat it. It used to be called navicular disease and over the years the name has changed many times.
Whatever you want to call it....it is extremely common in the kind of horses that we practice on and has been the end of more athletic careers than anything else by far.
In 2012 a veterinarian in England named Ian Wright described a surgical approach to the bursa of the navicular bone and began carrying out surgical procedures in that area that had never been done before.
He works on mostly sport horses and we work on western horses. We wanted to see how well it worked in the horses that come to our practice.... and we were amazed at the good it did.
We have modified some of the surgery to adapt to the quarter horse and added some cyst drilling osteostixis to the procedure. This surgery is done through two very small incisions with the arthroscope, working inside the hoof. It is the most exciting thing I have done in my career.
A few weeks ago I gave a talk to veterinarians in California about the procedure and, in preparing for the talk I gathered some statistics on the effectiveness of the surgery that we have seen so far
Most of the horses we have done the procedure on are what we title as “end stage”. Which means no other treatment is working on them and they are effectively no longer able to be used for their intended purpose.
I used the first 100 cases we did the surgery on and found that 72 percent that had the lesions described by Dr. Wright were back to doing their athletic event. These numbers are in line with what Dr. Wright found in England.
The surgery is of course coupled with mechanically corrected shoeing and physical therapy post-op.
I have been a vet for 30 years and I have spent the entire course of those years trying to find a way to help these horses continue doing what makes them and their owners smile. It has been a blessing to still be so excited about being a vet after all these years. And this procedure, developed by the vets in Lamesa, Texas, has kept me motivated and feeling so lucky to get to practice veterinary medicine.
The use of MRI diagnostics on the equine foot has opened many doors on this front. We can see problems in this area that we never knew existed just a few years back. Now we can identify them and as time goes by, we are developing ways to correct the problems. Veterinary medicine is at the forefront of the mechanics of motion and we are making strides that I never dreamed of thirty years ago.
