02/24/2026
Today’s tip of the day: Remember that they call it *practicing* veterinary medicine. Your vet can’t read a crystal ball.
If I have a project, I usually end up taking a horse to the vet several times, even within a month to get things lined out. That doesn’t mean I will always have to do that.
So let’s say we go in for some routine stuff, lameness exam, and today, the vet sees hocks and stifles. Pretty common.
Well I go home and ride the next couple weeks and something is still not 100%. So we go back.
This time they say SI, and knees or something like that. I go home and ride the next couple weeks, something still not right, so I go back.
This time, tmj/poll. I’ll go home and ride again.
This doesn’t mean that any one vet missed anything. It simply means that’s what they saw that day. Unfortunately horses don’t speak English and can be super tough. Sometimes it takes a few trips to get everything handled. Most of the time when I have these and do an “overhaul” trying to get them feeling 100%, once I get them lined out and working correctly, many things never need to be done again and that horse would just move to his regular routine maintenance going forward.
**This is my opinion, based on fixing a gajillion (*not literally; but A-LOT) project horses.
You would be SHOCKED what I can get right with a good vet and shoer.
But don’t lynch your vet because they missed something. You’re part of this equation too and what’s felt can be a lot stronger than what’s seen on a given day.
