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Howdy, I'm Dr. Robin Dabareiner I am an associate professor here
at Texas A&M. Myself and Dr. Kat Carter work on horses that
present to us for a lameness or muscular skeletory injuries. So
today we're going to go through how we diagnose where the pain
is, how we know how sever it is, and then we're going to talk
about treatment. So today we have Gray which the owner
dropped off. Gray is a barrel horse that is refusing to take
the left or the second and third barrel and we're trying to
figure out why. She said he feels a little funny behind. So
Courtney, what I'll do is like to go and look at the horse see
if there is any obvious lameness or blemishes or swellings. I see
we've got a swollen tendon sheath back here, when I flex
it, it is very sore. So on our standing muscular skeletory
exam, fifty percent of the time we should figure out where the
horse is going to be lame before we even watch it move. When
you're looking at a horse for lameness you can't look at all
four legs at once. Divide the horse in half just look at the
front feet and first thing see if he's got a head bob. If he
does, the head goes down on the good leg and up on the bad.
Because it hurts when he puts it down. If there is no head bob
look at the back legs, he's going to take a shorter step
with the lame one and bigger steps with the good one because
it's just like you or me limping, it hurts. Okay David,
and you always look at a lameness at a trot. They can be
lame at the trot, sound at the canter when you ride them. What
we do with the flexion test is we try to locate it to lower on
the leg or upper on the leg so you're going to flex it for
thirty seconds and if it makes grade lamer then we have a
pretty good indicating that It's coming from that swollen area.
And sure enough that made him a lot worse, or it made that
lameness a lot more obvious. So now between our muscle skeletor
exam and our lameness exam we have a pretty good idea where
the problem is coming from. So we have a pretty good idea, we
have soft tissue swelling, we've got pain from the lameness exam
so let's start with the ultrasound and see if we can
find some pathology. And you can see all this fiber in it and if
we move over, can we get a picture of those tendons. Let's
see if there's any damage in them. Now this horse last year
actually ran into a barrel and knocked out its right hip. It
had a little fragment and since grey is here for this new injury
we're just going to recheck that fracture today. What we're
looking at is this is a cross section area of the tendon so
this is the opposite leg, nice and healthy. This is the damaged
part of the tendon so about 40% of that tendon is damaged so
here in Grey we have an obvious lesion we can detect on
ultrasound but a significant amount of time we don't and to
better define what is going on especially if we don't have
obvious lesions then we utilize the MRI and the Cat scan. Not
only does MRI allow us to diagnose lesions that we can't
see with conventional diagnostics but it also allows
us to target surgical treatments. Jason, we have a
tear in the deflexor tendon. This would be normal and this
would be our abnormal. So I think we need a patent shoe so
we can take pressure off of this tendon and it will heal faster.
Often times the owner presents the horse not for lameness but a
change or decrease in performance and it's nice that
we have this arena that we can watch the horse doing it's job
which assist us with a diagnosis, instead of just
jogging him in hand. If you suspect that your horse has a
lameness or perhaps it's just not working up to it's
potential, a change in it's performance, then we recommend
that you either call your regular veterinarian or you can
call us here at Texas A&M Veterinary Teaching Hospital and
we will be glad to help you.