Summer Rewind: The Evolution of Equine Sports Medicine

i was going to say there's not that's not a word that's usually thrown out saying intelligent and speaking.

But I would say there's a lot

that came around.

One is my years here, and then even after that,

after I went to go be faculty at University of Georgia, coming back up here once a month to work up horses for a bit of time was instrumental.

You start to finish horse and see how it is, then they get to follow up on the horses.

That makes a huge difference.

And one of the things about... is that ultrasound's heavy experience is that when you're ultrasounding, you also get the opportunity to palpate and you get to test then your palpation skills at the same time.

And it just puts a whole, as a whole, puts everything to start to be together.

You're like, oh, well, know that wherever I palpate this, it doesn't relate back to what I see on the imaging necessarily.

So you get a way better idea of what's happening with your palpation skills, being able to put the probe on and then palpate again and then take the probe and put it other places and as a clinician come up with a better idea of what is happening with the animal, why it's lame in that particular area.

Among other kind of techniques that we use which are diagnostic anesthesia and Doppler interrogation all those things and imaging but the number one diagnostic tool is your hands eyes and brain and and I think that's really important is Putting your hands on the horse and understanding the horse More than just sitting in the darkroom.

Well, and we've all had you know, a Favorite comment I always love from practitioners, I'm sitting there talking to them about their referral bone scan or something, and they'll go, well, I'm not so sure I believe that because a bone scan can lie to you.

And you just try to get them focused a bit more.

And you say, every technology, it doesn't matter what it is, has shortcomings.

and positive things that you can take from it.

And it's up to you to make sure you understand those things.

Your hoof testers will lie to you because you will sit there and squeeze on the foot and you will get a reaction and yet your blocks show you that's not where the horse is lame well but sure sort of those hoof tests well it is sort of the hoof tester yeah those testers aren't lying to you no you're just making sure you're interpreting it correctly instead of incorrectly

yeah exactly

you know the interpretation

is you can either have false positive or false negatives and all of them lead to a limping horse still so you know you really got to focus those and like i said being a thorough examination, and then using imaging to confirm clinical suspicion of disease, I think is all the things that embody, one, sports medicine, and two, what International Society of Equine Locomotor Pathology, kind of the mainstay in education mission is putting everything together in a nice package.

And sometimes they're not an easy package to figure out, and they're very complicated, kind of in that way.

At least we have the tools to go through that, figure it out and try to get to the correct diagnosis.

And the correct diagnosis is the key because then we can also use that for targeted treatment and also prognostic value.

Exactly.