Back in Balance Equine Bodywork

17/08/2023

A very interesting preliminary case study on the potential cause of EORTH as well as a way to prevent it from getting worse in horses who already are suffering. It is about incisor pressure and balance…….that keep coming up. https://www.facebook.com/100057702038153/posts/723054176294644/

27/07/2023

More on equine dentistry. We all need to know a bit more so we can do a bit better for our horses. The lack of correct dental care can contribute to body wide issues. I look at all my clients horses insicors, checking for balance, a good sliding surface, and health of the gums. It can be tricky when a horse has just had a dental and I see hooks left on the insicors or side to side imbalance or even inflammation in the gums, things that the owner was not told about. I am not an equine dentist, but I do recognize these basics, thanks to Martine. Educate yourself so you can be your horses advocate.

16/07/2023

We need to be our horses advocates in all things including their veterinary care. That means educating yourself in things you may never have thought you wanted an education in. Why are we not asking why young horses have osteoarthritis in the first place, and then looking for ways to prevent it instead of arguing over which drug to use.

When it comes to holistic medicine there is a lot of push back for EVIDENCE.

But what about all the stuff we happily go along with when there is no evidence ? A discussion among veterinarians regarding the best product to use in a young horse with osteoarthritis led to seven different answers in the first hour ? Loads of new products on the market some of which are yielding some pretty impressive inflammatory reactions - Do you know which ones ?
On top of that our horses are sick - the hay and water and feed loaded with glyphosates - I literally have entire barns of semi metabolic horses that will show dramatic changes to their conditioning when changing environments. They are not processing products effectively and many very stagnant - making the risks of medications potentially higher.
Did you know that there are like seven different types of PRP machines all yielding different cell counts of platelets yielding different results ?

Okay but your going to wait on that myofascial treatment till there is some real evidence that it will work on your horse !!

04/07/2023

Part 2, molar occlusion, slant of the incisors and the possible connection to the preferential side for chewing. Part 3 coming up next!

23/06/2023

Always an amazing learning opportunity when Martine is in town. Proper reduction and balance of incisors is every bit as important as in the molars, yet seems to be very much neglected in many cases.

18/06/2023

Amen to this post. The horse industry has normalized and in fact encouraged the starting and competition of horses at much to young of an age, before they are physically mature enough to handle the strain. This results in horses that have very short careers and a possible painful future if any future at all. Let look at long term soundness instead of short term gains. https://www.facebook.com/100069845053277/posts/569378062067024/

11/05/2023

Following the death of 7 Thoroughbreds last week in Lexington more article's are being written talking about inbreeding, drug use, and confinement that all play a part in the numbers of catastrophic breakdowns we see in today's racehorses. How can we continue to justify this? Call it the sport of kings? It is simply a tragedy.https://www.espn.com.au/sports/horse/triplecrown08/columns/story?columnist=nack_bill&id=3399004. And a person has to ask, where does ECVM fit into all of this?

The real shame in Eight Belles' breakdown in the Kentucky Derby? Close watchers of bloodlines in thoroughbred breeding could have seen it coming, writes William Nack.

05/04/2023

I just had this conversation with a client today. The need to go beyond the diagnosis and treatment and ask why the illness, or lameness, or deficiency happened in the first. It might not be easy to find those answers but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be looking and then be doing what we can to address that primary issue.

"No one gets sick because of a deficiency in pharmacological supplementation"

And what I mean by this is that no human/horse/animal gets ill in the first instance because they weren't supplementing with medication.

They get ill because of a deficiency - be it nutritional, hormonal or, when looking at the musculoskeletal system, biomechanical.

We can use the medication to get better, but we need to identify why the illness occurred in the first place to work on a top down/bottom up approach to not only fix it, but ensure it doesn't happen again.

When we look at lameness in the horse, the horse's joints don't become inflamed because of the lack of arthramid or corticosteroids.

They become inflamed because of biomechanical disruption which from experience is led by supoptimal biomechanics.

So when the horse's joints are medicated, but the biomechanical stimulus (e.g. the suboptimal biomechanics) doesn't get addressed, the problem comes back...

And so we see a situation where a horse is repetitively medicated but the problem never really goes away.

The gait pattern remains the same but the horse is dealing with it because they've had temporary pain relief (even if temporary is a protracted time frame which buys the owner 6 months)

OR the owner puts the horse through a rehabilitation plan, to then end up riding the horse exactly how they were ridden before... to put them back in the biomechanical deficit which led to the pathology in the first place...

And I'm not saying that medicating is a bad thing - training through pain is utterly miserable (and unethical) - so taking the pain away, to then train the body is a very effective way of helping the horse to become more comfortable more quickly.

But just relying on medicating over and over again, but not changing the biomechanic stimulus can be equally as unethical as training through pain.

So if you are rehabilitating your horse right now, I invite you to look at how your horse moves and the deficit that you're trying to remedy

And identify the things that you can change about how you work or manage them, to safe guard against falling back into that biomechanical hole again.