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<< The following is a true story as relayed to me by a top notch endurance
vet
(veted the ROC several times) who was looking at my horses left front
shoulder to try to explain a problem he was seeing in the right rear. It
turned out her problem was in her misalignment in left knee. With the knee
fixed every thing else fell into place.>>
Well, now we're into the anecdotal, but, hey, I'm game. How did this top
notch endurance vet realign the left knee, pray tell. Some kind of surgery or
just a laying on of the hands? I've never seen a knee realigned.
>>There was a good endurance horse that started to have problems with its
right rear. When the vet watched the horse trot out he noticed the horse
was carring his head slightly cocked. He asked the owner to put in the bit
and trot out the horse. The head was even more cocked and turned silghtly
to the left. Upon farther examination, the horse had an abcessed tooth -
which was being aggreviated by the bit. The horse was compensentating for
the pain the way he held his head. This put streses on the horses left
front and he was compensating with his right rear. The right rear showed
the stress.>>
Truman, in the Standardbred game, this is one of the very basics--the first
thing you do when a horse goes on a line is check the mouth. But hey, it's
not a religion and doesn't require a tooth fairy.
>>Clearly fixing the tooth did not immediately fix the legs - it took time
for the legs to heal. But if the tooth had not been fixed, it would have
done no good to fix the legs.>>
What's amazing is that the mouth problem was neglected so long that it caused
hind leg problems.
>>In the endurance horse if you don't fix the root cause - you don't fix the
problem. In the case of the horse above the distance between the root
cause and the soreness was about four feet as was the case with my mare.>>
In any athlete, human or equine, if you don't diagnose the problem
accurately, then discover the etiology, then eliminate the, sometimes
multiple, causes, you're just playing games. It is very rare that today's
right fore lameness does not originate in the right fore. At least to the
extent that when you see the horse nodding at the trot, the first, second,
third and fourth examination areas do not include the mouth.
ti
Truman
>>
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