 |
RE: [RC] Selenium - heidiI agree with everything Heidi said. However, I like the newly-approved selenium yeast as the oral supplement form over the inorganic sodium selenite, I?ve had good luck with it in our practice. The info sure looks good on it. If you want to boost levels fairly quickly, you can ask your vet to administer the injectable form, about 12 ccs, intramuscularly. Any time I?ve treated horses with only the selenium, there have always been side effects to one extent or another---mild colic symptoms, hives, elevated heart rate, significant muscle soreness. So I like to premedicate with flunixin meglamine (Banamine) IV at 1.1 mg/kg (this suggestion is for you to pass on to your vet, not to try yourself), plus about 20 mg of dexamethasone sodium phosphate IV maybe ten minutes before the selenium IM. I also put just a squidge of dex into the same syringe as the selenium. Much better results, no more worried calls from the owners after a treatment and I don?t have to hang around for an hour waiting for bad things to materialize. Some of the racetrack vets inject selenium IV, but a fair number also die from the practice every year and there?s no clear advantage that outweighs the risk, so I personally would *never* do so, regardless of how low the serum assays wa s. Well, I had considerable opportunity to research IM vs IV as I had a horse die of anaphylaxis following an IV injection of E-Se. What I found in all of that research was that the death rate was about 1 in 33,000 (which, incidentally, is pretty close to what it is for many common vaccines and for penicillin, if memory serves) and that there is virtually no difference in the death rate, whether you give it IM or IV. I've given several thousand doses of E-Se IV over the years (more than 1,000 but less than 10,000) and this was the one and only reaction I ever had to it. I dislike giving it IM for the very reasons that you state, in addition to the fact that it is an uncomfortable injection to give--so I continue to use it IV. The only times I give it IM is to young foals--and that is usually because I am by myself with them, and it is a lot easier to crowd them into a fence with my hip, hike their little tails in the air to restrain them, and give the stuff in the back of the thigh than it is to singlehandedly give it IV. Even then, it is not all that uncommon for them to have a little bit of a tender or swollen spot in the back of the thigh. As for the dose, I give 1 ml per 100 lbs--even in our highly deficient area of central Oregon where I was for nearly 20 years, I didn't find any need to exceed that dosage. Heidi =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-= Ridecamp is a service of Endurance Net, http://www.endurance.net. Information, Policy, Disclaimer: http://www.endurance.net/Ridecamp Subscribe/Unsubscribe http://www.endurance.net/ridecamp/logon.asp Ride Long and Ride Safe!! =-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=
|