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.

14/03/2023

More on the importance of looking at the whole horse. Dental balance is about more than just how the horse chews.

17/01/2023

One of the many ways negative palmar angles and caudal hoof failure affect the body.

Sometimes saddle fit issues are not about the saddle - they're about the horse. And sometimes the issues are starting at ground level.

The postural effects caused by underrun heels (actually caudal hoof failure) richochet right through the body.

One of the worst things we can do is fit a saddle firmly around those narrow withers like a clothes peg. Any chance of redeveloping muscle as the hooves improve (because of course, the horse is receiving remedial hoof care, isn't it?) and the posture normalises is limited unless the horse can move correctly. That means creating space for redevelopment without compromising saddle stability.

Again, it's simply the essence of the issue from a bodyworker's point of view. I'm making no claims to be scientific here, but it's what I've been seeing in over 15 years of bodywork practice.

Visit and follow my blog for regular body talk articles: https://thehorsesback.com

- Jane

23/12/2022

I happened to watch the 45 second video referred to in this post. I didn’t care for the cavalier attitude of the rider. How refreshing that a follow post has been made addressing what was apparently a large number of people that felt similar to the way I did. It is a really good discussion.

Last week, we posted a 45-second video of Karl Cook talking about his 5* Grand Prix winning mount Kalinka van’t Zorgvleit.

23/12/2022

Another excellent post regarding the ethics and morals of how we train. “It is not for me to preach to anyone what their ethics should be, but it is important that we think about our horsemanship not just in terms of how to be effective but also in terms of how to be kind to our horses”

A MORAL HIGH HORSE

In the season of goodwill, I thought this might be an interesting topic to ponder.

I received an email from a friend who has been reading my book, “The Essence Of Good Horsemanship.” She wrote, “…. the most frustrating thing about it is, the more I read of it, the more I question the ethics of riding which goes against everything I see on a daily basis.”

It was never my intention for the book to make people feel bad for riding horses. We all have our own reasons for riding and working with horses and I hope nothing in the book makes people they are being judged for what they do.

However, I believe that anybody who loves horses questions the ethics of how they approach working with these amazing animals from time to time. I mean personal ethics to a large degree, form the basis of which training methods people will use or won’t use when deciding a philosophy of training to follow.

It is healthy and even desirable to be guided by one's ethics when training any animal. Our personal moral compass not only allows us to sleep soundly at night, but it sets the boundaries of what we believe are acceptable limits to training methods. In addition, the moral compass ensures we constantly question if something is in a horse’s best interest and we use it to judge the work of others.

However, there is a problem that should be considered.

The problem is that if we choose to work within the limits of the best interests of a horse and refuse to use methods or participate in practices that are outside those parameters, how do we determine the dividing line between acceptable and unacceptable training? To me, it seems that the line is very arbitrary and not something that can be located with certainty.

The reason why there is no distinct boundary between what is ethical and what is not is that ethics are personal. There is no objective measure of these things that a person can turn to and use to assess if the horse’s best interest is being cared for. People will judge these things from their personal perspective and assume that a horse will feel the same – “what’s good for me, is good for my horse.” But I bet that if horses were less compliant, we would discover that what we often think is in a horse’s best interest would put a lot more people in hospital a lot more often. But horses are very compliant and I believe that is the crux we need to consider when asking if riding horses is ethical. I’ll try to explain further.

Trainers often talk about the primary motivator for shaping behaviour as safety and comfort. We try to avoid compromising a horse’s sense of safety because when their survival instinct kicks in they become less teachable. However, we spend our entire working lives compromising their comfort. We use discomfort to lead them into choosing a behaviour that we desire by showing them that’s where comfort is found. Nevertheless, we are the ones that apply the discomfort. Even though we try to lead them to comfort, we can’t be patting ourselves on the back for being nice people when we cause discomfort in the first place. It’s part of the moral dilemma.

So the question is, in our efforts to train a horse, how badly off are they? Is the very fact that we impose our desire on a horse – even if using “kind” methods – morally justified?

Of course, nobody knows the answer, but since you are reading my page you are going to get my guesses.

I believe horses need a few things in order to be okay (I avoid using the term ‘happy’ because I think that is too difficult to think about, so I am substituting okay-ness). I think they need companionship, health, an absence of a perceived threat to survival, and emotional comfort.

I should elaborate on those parameters. Health includes enough food to sustain good health, soundness, and physical comfort (no skin irritations, parasites, aches, pains, etc). When I say an absence of perceived threats to survival, the word perceived is important because if a horse doesn’t know its life is in jeopardy there is no reason to suppose it is not emotionally okay. And emotional comfort encompasses both physical and psychological comfort. For example, when a foal is being weaned it may be physically comfortable, but emotionally uncomfortable. However, a horse with a sore back will be both physically and emotionally uncomfortable.

To go back to the training issue, the one thing we are always compromising on is the emotional comfort of a horse. Personally, I believe that companionship, health, and safety are a must for a horse to feel ok. However, the variable that is somewhat more flexible is emotional comfort, in my opinion. I’m not convinced that a horse MUST be always emotionally comfortable to have an okay life.

People constantly put pressure to cause emotional discomfort to a horse and shape behaviour. That’s how training works – even positive reinforcement training works on this principle. I believe it is possible to impose a level of emotional discomfort on a horse and still be working within the best interests of the horse (if we assume that horses have to get along with people). However, there are two provisos. First, we must not push the limits of discomfort to where a horse begins to feel its survival is threatened. And secondly, we have to ensure that the horse finds emotional comfort once again through the training (as opposed to comfort being found because the training has stopped). If these conditions are met I believe a horse can have a comfortable life and feel okay (maybe even happy, although I dare not say it) about working with people.

So the last question that comes to my mind is what about horses that live a life where emotional comfort is questionable? For example, riding school horses or high-level competition horses or circus horses or horses pulling carriages loaded with tourists through large cities or movie stunt horses, or pit ponies? Can those horses feel okay? Is it ethical?

I believe I have seen examples of all those types of horses where life was okay. But the thing that I have learned about horses is that they are not like most people. Horses tend to accept their lot in life a lot easier than most people do. Horses don’t mull over how woeful their life is. Horses just do it. That’s one reason horses are so amazing, and so giving. If they have to take a novice rider through the hills day after day while being jabbed in the mouth and thumped on their back, they learn to be okay with it – they may not love it, but they don’t have to hate it either. And when it’s over, it’s over.

So to my friend who is questioning the ethics of riding that she sees on a daily basis, I say the fact that you are questioning is wonderful. We should all question what we do and its effects on our horses. It’s not for me to preach to anyone what their ethics should be, but it is important that we all think about our horsemanship not just in terms of how to be effective, but also in terms of how to be kind to our horses.

Photo: Checking in with our Welsh pony, May.

23/12/2022

“Are you training in the tank or in the ocean”? I love that there are so many horse people eloquently talking about the morals and ethics of how we train horses, with horse welfare being the focus.

22/12/2022

Thank you for this post Dr. Kate! Dr. Kate Workman and Dr. Audrey Declue are 2 of the vets that attended the Sharon May Davis dissections last Feb. They have also visited us here at the Bone Room!

Just because your horse is not LAME does not mean its SOUND.

It's time we separate soundness from lameness. Its part of our daily conversations with owners. They have seen multiple vets, trainers, and are even competing their horses because they are told the horse jogs and flexes fine so it is sound. There are a lot of horses showing that are not totally sound.

Lameness is defined as an impediment to walking due to feet or legs. Soundness is defined as the state of being in good condition. This is an important distinction we need to start addressing in horses. Just because your horse jogs and flexes without concern does not mean your horse is sound. We need to raise the bar in what we consider acceptable to horses soundness and overall well being. Horses are amazing creatures, that tolerate a lot from us. They try to express their discomfort but sadly most go unheard. If their message goes unheard for too long, they often become behavioral or checked out. One of our most common calls is that the horse is increasingly difficult to work with and is becoming dangerous but the owner have been told there is nothing wrong. They are at a loss for answers.

It is NOT okay they pin their ears, constantly swish their tails, get fidgety, are bad for the farrier, bite at or look at themselves, unable to lounge, buck/rear/spook, get cast, sit on the wall, bank shavings, toss their heads, kick out, are not be able to back up, avoid collection, hop into transitions, hate to be brushed, chronically shift their blankets/saddle, or stand abnormally. ALL of these are signs of discomfort.

Its not their temperament. It is their expression of PAIN! We need to stop excusing it as thats just the way they are or they are difficult/fresh/jerks/wimps. That is not normal behavior for horses. They are trying to tell you they are uncomfortable and they deserve for us to listen to them.

We owe it to them to look at their whole presentation not just how they jog/flex on their legs. We owe it to them to not ride them when they are clearly trying to show they are in pain

Its time we are better to these amazing athletes.

DeClue Equine

21/12/2022

Finding the primary cause of injury and assessing the posture, biomechanics and restriction of mobility that caused the injury will allow a successful rehab and make re-injury much less likely.

Over the past couple of weeks I have spoken with many owners who talk about horses injuring the same limb time and time again, not necessarily the same injury but injuries sustained to the same limb. This could be tendon and ligament injuries or joint inflammation/pain. I hear them say the injuries are not related, that its just the horses weak limb/area etc etc. Its the horses conformation thats caused it. Or, its to be expected because the horse does X job.

Then there are the injuries that only get so far through a rehab plan and cannot get past a certain point.

In my opinion, we need to start looking at these injuries from a different angle.

1. Why does that horse keep injuring the same limb or have reoccurring pain in joints?.

I would say that there is clearly some over loading of that limb and that will come from way higher up than the limb itself. The injury itself is the end result of a long line of biomechanical adaptations the body has made which has resulted in the limb bearing more weight than it should. There is only so much time a structure can be over loaded
before there is structural failure. This is simple engineering. Simple physics.

So, to prevent further damage we need to source the root of the biomechanical adaptations and start there. AT THE SOURCE.

By doing so we can prevent further damages as we aim to 'level up' the weight distributed so that it is within parameters that the structures can cope with. We therefore prevent further structural failure. This is totally possible with an 'outside the box' approach.

I have done it and I know a small group of others who have taken this approach with great success.

2. We need to rewrite the 'rehab programme' to one that actually helps the horse to heal.

If we have a poor posture that unevenly distributes the weight so that structural parameters are being exceeded, causing structural failure, why do we think exercising the horse for X length of time and increasing that length of time will be useful for 'rehab' in these cases?.

Think of it this way...

You have a poor postural stance that causes you knee pain when you exercise.

You rest, the pain and any tissue traumas heal/subside.

You feel better. So, you begin to exercise.

The pain and tissue traumas come back.

Why?

Because you did nothing to change your posture which was the root cause of the knees being over loaded beyond their loading parameters, causing tissue damage and pain.

If however, you learnt how to make postural changes that would off load the knees and then today you took 10 strides in that new postural balance and 15 tomorrow, 20 the next day and so on you would in a couple of weeks have retrained your brain to movement in a new state of postural balance.

As you build up the steps of good posture and it becomes the norm for your body you can increase the amount of steps you take and increase the 'work' you do, whatever that is for you. It could be jogging a few strides, dancing, returning to a sport you do or running a marathon.

If however, you stayed in your old postural pattern that over loads your knees and increased your exercise by a time scale only it wont be too long before you are back to your knees being inflamed and hurting. Once again being loaded beyond their structural parameters. You have changed nothing except the time scale.

So why do we increase the time scale of walking/riding/lungeing/horse walker for the horse on 'rehab' while it is still going to execute the taken steps with a poor balance which continues to overload the injured area?. 🤷‍♀️

🤓 Everything taught at my clinics, in lessons and to owners undergoing the rehabilitation of their horses with me aims to get the rider understanding the horse better from an anatomical and biomechanical approach and to learn how to improve the horses balance and posture for soundness.

If we aim for this approach maybe we can ditch the conventional incremental time 'rehab' plans. Sound horses do not need rehabbing.

I really love helping people to keep their horses sound.

DM for more details.

Please feel free to share this post 👍

21/12/2022

This is good information. I can’t tell you how many times I have said to people when they say it has been there a long time or the vet said it is nothing, that “it is something”. It is inflammation, and not to be ignored.

*** WINDGALLS, and WHEN YOU NEED TO WORRY ***

I’ve seen a fair amount of scary advice being handed out on social media recently, about tendon sheath effusions, so I have decided to write a little article all about “windgalls”, which is the basic term for a tendon sheath effusion.

I would like to start by saying that a windgall is ALWAYS something to show some concern about. If it’s in just ONE leg, it is something to be VERY concerned about, as it indicates damage to the tendon sheath, or the structures within the tendon sheath.

If a windgall is present in both hindlimbs, both forelimbs, or all four limbs, then it’s more likely to be of idiopathic origin, and less likely to cause any future lameness concerns. But it’s still essential to note it, and essential to know what is “normal” for your horse; for example, if he always has mild tendon sheath effusion in both hindlegs (windgalls), but one suddenly becomes much larger than the other, this would be concerning. Windgalls are far more common in the hindlimbs, compared to the forelimbs, and if I find them in the forelimbs when the horse hasn’t just done a lot of work, such as a big event, I would be concerned about poor conformation or foot balance in that horse. If I find them in the hindlimbs, the horse is sound, and the swelling is soft to palpate, then I wouldn’t be overly concerned.

Windgalls can be “articular” - associated with the fetlock joint - or “tendinous” - an excessive amount of fluid in the tendon sheath. Both types indicate changes/inflammation within the structure. So although many horses have tendinous windgalls, especially in the hind limbs, they are never “nothing”. Some inflammation has caused that excessive synovial fluid to form, and a “swollen” tendon sheath is sometimes just as important as a “swollen” joint, especially if it’s in just one leg.

The tendon sheath “houses” several important structures, the most important of which is the deep digital flexor tendon (DDFT). Injuries to the DDFT are never good, as this tendon is very important, and very hard to fix. More on this in part two.

In the absence of any effusion (swelling), so in an uninjured, uninflamed tendon sheath, it is almost impossible to see or feel at least the upper part of it. You can only ever feel where a tendon sheath sits, when it has an excessive amount of synovial fluid in it, which is when it is inflamed. A tendinous windgall is therefore an inflamed or injured tendon sheath.

Part two of this mini series, will include the structures in the tendon sheath, and how we go about diagnosing which structure is damaged. I will also explain why I use contrast radiography, rather than ultrasonography, to diagnose which structure is damaged in the case of a single limb tendon sheath effusion, and why ultrasonography (US) of a tendon sheath can be very inaccurate. (Note I am talking about the tendon SHEATH and not tendons outside of the sheath, for which US is the gold standard).

Please share, as I don’t want to see another post with someone being advised that a single limb tendon sheath effusion, is nothing to worry about! The photo also shows you exactly where the tendon sheath is on the leg.

16/12/2022

"It is clear from the results of the study that dressage performance within competition is not being assessed in accordance with FEI guidelines, with certain conflict behaviors being rewarded and many being ignored."

A study examined high dressage marks awarded to horses with head positions behind the vertical, in direct conflict with FEI dressage rules.

01/12/2022

Looking at the horse from a whole horse perspective is so important. Everything in the body really is all connected, so looking for patterns of adaptation and compensation as part of any lameness or injury is a must. They are not machines that we can replace a loose or broken piece on and expect them to be whole again.

When I graduated from veterinary school in 1991 most of equine sports medicine was doing arthroscopic surgery on racehorses. What we learned in school was minimal and the mantra was 85% of all lameness is in the foot.
Today you feel incompetent without an arsenal of equipment - learning how to use and interpret takes up a lot of time. People gather around screens while the horse is quietly sharing his story.

At this years AAEP the experts lectured on the importance of examining the whole horse. They discussed how the vets needed to understand the fascia and be able to palpate acupuncture points. I could feel the discomfort in the room and the overall confusion about some of these modalities. The time, the money, the advanced training needed to become as proficient as our experts. I was glad that these conversations were happening and felt like less of an outlier for having changed my focus from the distal limbs many years ago.
I find many vets in the weird position of having authority over things they know little about. This tends to perpetuate concepts and ideas and prevents thinking.
It takes good mentors, a curious mind or advanced training to be open to the possibility that lameness may not actually start in the foot like we were told so many years ago.
All equestrians need to start recognizing the importance of compensatory patterns to allow early intervention.

What are the things I haven’t included ?
Birth trauma
Mental health
Training
Tack
Environment
Owner
Nutrition
Breed

17/11/2022

This article is pointing out that there is not science behind the effectiveness, frequency of dosage, dosage or even if these orthobiologics are more affective than NSAIDS and time off. biohttps://thehorse.com/1117802/the-pros-and-cons-of-orthobiologics-in-horses/

The key concepts behind 6 orthobiologics available to equine veterinarians.