The Main Purpose

Our main interest is the diagnosis and treatment of back pain in sport horses.

Back pain is not only a highly controversial subject in the performance horse industry, but a very complex problem that probably has affected or will affect most of horses at some point of their career.

Most horse owners, trainers and veterinarians concentrate their efforts on treating back pain locally with different approaches varying from massage therapy, acupuncture, chiropractics, extracorporeal shock wave therapy, messotherapy all the way to holistic medicine and horse physiques.

This therapies might take care of the pain for a short period of time, but will not long term since the primary cause of it has not been addressed, becoming a frustrating never ending cycle for all people involved.

What can be done to deal with it? Since back pain in performance horses, unless there is a history of direct trauma is 90% of the time secondary to soreness/lameness elsewhere; identifying and treating those primary problems will most likely resolve it.

Furthermore, if this primary sources of back pain are not taken care off soon enough, the back it self can becomes then a primary problem in the form of sacroiliac joint arthritis, lumbosacral joint arthritis, kissing spines etc

Our approach takes care of the of the pain in a short period of time, lasts longer, and makes it less frustrating to deal with. It reduce the horse’s down time, and maximize the horse’s performance.

It is therefore very important to treat soreness before it becomes lameness.

State of the art technology available now days such as Nuclear, Scintigraphy, Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Digital Radiology (DR), Digital Ultrasound etc are invaluable tools to evaluate the magnitude, extent and complexity of the problems. There are also very important in the prognosis of the different pathologies. Unfortunately there are quite a few sources of back pain that no equipment is able to detect/diagnose.

There is no machine or piece of equipment that will substitute the ability of the clinician to diagnose, specially when one is dealing with a sore and not an obvious lame horse.

There are two very important things to have in mind when you’re trying to maximize your horse’s performance:

1.	It is always better and cheaper to do preventative medicine and treat the sore horse, instead of doing curative medicine and treat the lame horse.
2.	It doesn´t mater how good of a rider, trainer, farrier, veterinarian, groom any body is, it is a 24/7 TEAM WORK effort and nobody will be able to do it on its own