Sports Medicine
In order to keep our athletic patients sound, safe, and happy, we employ a range of diagnostics and treatments to come up with the best plan for your horse.
Lameness Locator®
The Lameness Locator® is a device with 3 inertial sensors that attach to the horse's body, and can determine which leg is the source of a lameness, and assign a precise value to the degree. It is most useful in cases where the horse isn't performing as he used to, or feels off under saddle but isn't obviously lame from the ground. It can also be used to provide an objective measure of improvement from a nerve block.
Legend® and Adequan®
Often times, decrease in performance can be due to small problems in multiple areas. Legend® is a once-monthly injection of hyaluronic acid, while Adequan® is a multi-dose series of injections with PSGAGs (polysulfated glysoaminoglycans). Both have been shown to help horses; they may benefit from one or both.
Joint Injections
If a specific joint is identified as the cause of a lameness, a steroid and hyaluronic acid can be directly into the joint, to provide potent, targeted pain relief. In addition to joints in the leg, we are able to inject deeper joints, such as in the neck or sacroiliacs under ultrasound guidance.
Regenerative Medicine
The veterinary community continues to do research to improve the quality and efficacy of using the body's own healing tools, in the form of IRAP, stem cells, and PRP.
Absent a diagnosis, surgery is trauma, medicine is poison, and alternative medicines are witchcraft.
Kent Allen DVM