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 Post subject: knee arthritis
PostPosted: Tue Jun 23, 2015 10:31 am 
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Joined: Wed May 27, 2015 10:20 am
Posts: 515
A question from a poster:

Quote:
Ok... I have a 3 y/o that won for me in a $20,000 maiden claiming and had been hitting the board every time out. All of a sudden the horse isn't training, having works or being entered in races. (2 1/2 months) The last 2 times out the horse has done NOTHING. The trainer says it's in the knee (which he has been injecting) now he wants me to bring the horse home for 90 days for a rest which is fine with me. But doesn't when you have arthritis that means that you have been hurt sometime or another? I broke my leg and I have arthritis in it. Any suggestions? I'm probably going to have his knee x-rayed to see what's up b/c I can't get anything out of the trainer except arthritis. Keep in mind... he had another horse (2 y/o)for me that he brought back with a fractured knee. See the pattern?



My answer:



Chances are at BEST, the horse seemed a little stiff warming up in the
beginning and your trainer did his own diagnosis with "arthritis" and had
the vet hit the knee with steroids and/or acid. I guess what I am saying is
that arthritis in the equine is a pretty much catch-all diagnosis with
nothing much to back up that diagnosis outside of the stiff gait. I have
never seen any thing conclusive come out of radiographs and other tests to
substantiate subtle cases of arthritic diagnosis. I have never had much faith in x-rays when it
comes to this kind of subtle osseous pathology. Sure you can often get a vet
to take a radiograph and come up with some certain diagnosis by viewing the
shadows, but what does it really mean or prove outside he is trying to
justify the high cost of the x-ray as useful? Chances are the abnormal bone
tissue they have just seen after taking expensive pictures may have quite
likely been present before the current soreness ever appeared---only there are no
radiographs to compare before and after. I have always said that x-rays are
pretty much worthless unless you want to know which bone is actually
fractured in a dead lame horse. If you want them for a subtle lameness
diagnosis, I say good luck! Take the diagnosis of compressed spinal disks in
humans. Many, many MDs take their back-aching patients in for imaging that
show disk pathology which provides "prove" that the disk is involved as
suspected. The only problem that almost all adult humans have lower disk
pathology just from every day wear. Same thing can happen in the equine.

Yes there is a pattern. Good point. Your trainer may be hard on knees. Does
he like the long toe/low heel configuration and standard toe grabs? Not good
for knees.

I guess all we know for sure is that your 3 year old is too sore to work or
race. Injections can cause more damage than they are suppose to help. All
you can do now is give him a few months off and try to bring him back. The
traditional method is to start painting his knees during the turn-out phase
with a good knee paint. I would avoid severe blisters, but a paint that will
produce some hard scurf would probably be desirable. Outside of that, I am
intrigued with some of the work that was done by Robert Becker MD in his
book "The Body Electric". In it he describes using silver ions and low
electrical current to actually change damage joint cartilage cells into stem
cells to aid in joint regeneration. Fascinating! I would like to try
painting a knee with colloidal silver/DMSO knee paint and placing electrodes
over the knee with a very low DC current to stimulate Becker's procedure.
Some day I will try it. Outside of that, you might also consider the use of
mullein root and comfrey root in a DMSO paint as a possible knee paint to
stimulate joint healing, if you want the alternative medical route.

I also did a webpage on this subject delving into the use of ozone, hydrogen peroxide and other modalities that seem to help out arthritic damaged joints:

http://racehorseherbal.net/arthritic%20joints.html

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