S2 E14: OTTBs in Motion: Rehab, Resilience & Recovery with Dr. Ashley Taylor (Part 1)

S2 E14: OTTBs in Motion: Rehab, Resilience & Recovery with Dr. Ashley Taylor (Part 1) (Transcript)
[00:00:00] Hi, everyone. And welcome back to OTTB OnTap. I'm Niamh. And I'm Emily. Hey, Niamh. What's on tap today? Today, we're talking with Dr.
Ashley Taylor, DVM, who co owns Sports Medicine Associates of Chester County and leads Twin Ponds Farm, a premier equine rehabilitation, fitness, and wellness center in Cochranville, PA. We're going to chat about Ashley's background and the amazing wellness center that she's created with her team and get into the taboo or not so taboo topic of pre purchase exams.
Ashley, thank you so much for taking time out of your busy schedule to chat with us today. You're very welcome. I'm very excited to be here. just to get started, will you give us a little background about yourself and your history with horses and then how you got involved in veterinary medicine?
Sure. So I grew up in Topsfield, Massachusetts, which is in the North Shore. of Massachusetts. And I had just a love for horses from a young age. Both my parents were not horsey or not particularly even into animals. And my two younger sisters followed suit. So we were kind of three horse crazy girls. We had a big background in pony club and eventing, and we did that growing up.
And I had a Really adorable appendix quarter horse that was very sweet, but not very athletic so I just mostly stuck to the lower levels competing him and my parents were great and supportive in the fact that they had three girls we all had horses they bought a farm But it was very much like this is your horse And this is what you get.
So and pony club, I really got pulled a lot toward the veterinary and horse care aspect of my interest in that, because even though my horse kind of maxed out at a certain level, that was something I could continue to learn and explore. And that really got me into the idea pretty young that I wanted to be a veterinarian.
I always knew I wanted to work with horses. So from there, that same sweet quarter horse cross ended up having quite a bit of lameness issues. And so that kind of solidified. Me wanting to know what was going on and how to fix them. I went to the University of Finley for undergrad, which is a small private horsey school in Northwest Ohio.
Okay. And went to Michigan State University for veterinary school. back to the East Coast to New England equine for an internship and Once I left my internship there I practiced for About three years for a small Equine and mixed animal practice close to where I grew up and continued to kind of get some mentorship from one of my Mentors from my internship and he was a surgeon and did sports medicine.
I knew that's what I really wanted to do. And then I ended up in Aiken one winter with some clients from Massachusetts and I met Dr. Keene and he basically was like, what do I have to do to get you to move to Pennsylvania and come on there? So I very quickly got on the phone with my husband and was like, we have to move to Pennsylvania.
So. Yeah, I joined him almost 11 years ago at this point, and we, myself and Dr. Gassert bought the practice together two years ago and kind of shortly before that we had bought the farm that we now call Twin Ponds Farm. So yeah, it's been a big couple of years, but yeah, I don't know how I got to.
Where I am now, the Cliff Notes version. That sounds like a wild ride. What kinds of experiences have you had with off track thoroughbreds that makes them stand out to you? Yeah. So, I've had a lot of experiences with off the track thoroughbreds, both. Personally and professionally I've personally had seven off the track thoroughbreds that I've restarted a couple that I've kept and competed for longer periods of time.
And a couple of that have been kind of resale rehome horses. And we primarily work on upper level event horses in our practice. And actually my business partner. Mostly works are racehorses. So that's a big part of her piece of the practice. So I've gotten to experience them in all different forms, whether they've been my own personal riding horses, whether they've been, clients of the practice and.
I think the big standouts about them are their resilience and their work ethic, and they're very trainable, whether that's mostly for the good, but sometimes for the bad. They're too smart for their own good. Yeah. Has there been any particular cases or moments with Off the Track Thoroughbreds that have been especially memorable or impactful in your career?
Yeah, I had to think about this because I've had the pleasure of working with several of them and Many that are at the top of our sport, which is really cool. There've been some that I've vetted for clients that are just fresh off the track. And I have one in particular, who's getting ready to do his first five star this year.
So both the rider and the horse. So it's really incredible to work with them. And I've had a couple that have really taught me a lot about. management over the years because they've had particular issues that we've had to not really work around, but that we've had to learn to manage. And I think it's helped me with other horses.
And we had one in particular that had an old tendon injury that we had to kind of frequently monitor. And for that unfortunate horse and rider, I had to tell him the morning that they were shipping out to Kentucky, that He couldn't go because I was [00:06:00] ultrasounding the tendon one last time and it just did not look how I wanted it to.
So that horse, we had to find a new strategy on how to manage him. And we essentially ended up doing swimming as all of his fitness work. He would run prep events and gallop, obviously, but his traditional, like every four days of galloping to prepare for a five star, we would. Swim him. And that horse went around Kentucky the following year and was inside the time and just recovered like no problem.
And I was the first time I had ever prepared a horse for a five star that way. And I thought, well, we're, it was not working the way that we're doing it. And I mean, it goes to show the horses resilience and thoroughbreds are just so athletic and built to gallop. And I think that's probably part of the reason why this worked, but Yeah, there's been some interesting cases that I've had to deal with, but I think, where there's a will, there's a way, and these horses, if that, if, any breed is going to do it for you, I think the thoroughbreds really will try.
I'm just thinking about them swimming and, and about how cool it is to work their whole body muscularly, and then their, cardiovascular system without that concussive force of meeting the ground, but they're still using their body. And that's such a cool takeaway. Going forward, you're probably going to be thinking about that a lot now with other horses that come along.
Yeah, for sure. I think the unfortunate part is that it's not readily available in a lot of areas. You have to have the right setup for it. We at our farm actually have a. pond that was set up to swim. We bought the farm from Bruce Miller, who was kind of a famed racehorse trainer in our area. And he had built and designed the pond for the horses to swim and need some work before we can use it here.
But other than that, I think there's one other private thoroughbred farm that I know has a swimming pond. And I don't know if they have anything down. At Fair Hill, like they do at Kesmark where you can actually put them in the pool. Maui Meadows has yeah, so they can swim. But it's not as easy to necessarily do and you have to have someone who's skilled because you can have some scary accidents and things happen.
So But it is definitely a way that you can kind of manage and I think really the only way that you can get them cardiovascularly fit. We have the water treadmill here, but that's a different form of exercise. You can't get their heart rate up as high as you can with the galloping, but the swimming.
You can. So it's pretty cool. It's really cool. We actually, this is kind of a weird story, but Emily and I looked at this farm years ago in South Jersey. It was a old standard bread farm. Yeah. I forgot about that place. Oh my God. It was so wild. We went there. There was like 600 stalls and it was just a track.
It was, and they had a pool and they were like, come look at the pool. And this is the scariest thing we've ever seen. Ever seen there were all like, yeah, there were all these, it was operational. You could hear the pumps running and everything like that. But there was a weird, apartment off the side of the anyways, the adventures we got ourselves into, but, you know, we almost bought a place with a pool.
Luckily we ran away from that place, but I don't even know what you, and that was maybe an exaggeration, but there were literally like. For shed rows that were occupied, and they were like, the tenants come with the place and we were like that's pretty unbelievable. Yeah
are there any particular lessons that you have learned as your work has evolved over the years, specifically from working with OTTVs? Yeah, I mean that's an interesting question and I think Over the years, medicine and lameness in general is improving and we're learning a lot about imaging and, I was thinking at this meeting that we were just at, how even the evolution of, CT and PET scan have, really helped us Diagnose lateness and figure out what's wrong with some of these horses.
But I think the biggest thing that thoroughbreds have taught me when kind of working up these cases is just patience, like patience when you're handling them. Because some of them have had some bad experiences and are they're needle phobic or they've been blocked or they've been injected and it's maybe not been done in a kind way.
So just patience when handling them, when working on them. When diagnosing them, sometimes things don't come easy. It's not obvious. It looks like an abscess, but it's something weird. And so just kind of taking the time to really figure that out and then patience when you're rehabbing them.
And I think when you kind of follow that and even like, like I said, I had personal horses when training them, if you can kind of just always be patient, that's a big lesson in that. Those horses in particular have kind of taught me and the variety of different aspects that I've had them in my life and in veterinary medicine for sure.
Would you say that you find them to be? More stoic than other breeds or because in my experience, which is obviously a small fraction of, of yours is that I tend to, I just have found that them to be incredibly stoic regarding their bodies to a certain degree. Yeah, I would agree with that because I think like going back to the work ethic thing, most of these horses from a really young age, they're handled and then they're like prepared for a sale and then they're prepared to start working and then they start, they basically have a career.
It's almost like a kid that you're, has to earn You know, like a, what do you call it? Like a, not a salary. What do you give little kids when they do trans Oh, an allowance. Yeah. An allowance. Yeah. Like, you're teaching them, you have to do things to earn your keep and, I think thoroughbreds are a little bit like that.
They're used to [00:12:00] getting up every day and, having a job and I think a lot of them do that job no matter how they're feeling. If they're sore from the day before or if they have something that's kind of underlying and I think that's part of the importance in their management and something else I've learned from them is being preventative is so important because I think a lot of things develop that could have been caught earlier because they are They are pretty tough and pretty stoic and I think that most of them are kind of happy or just set in the way that you get on and they are going to go and work for you and it doesn't always mean that they're the most comfortable.
So that's a great way to put it. Yeah. Have you had any and I think it's a really special come back or underdog stories that you'd like to share with us about off the track thoroughbreds that you've worked with. Yeah. So we had one really special horse. His name is Jagger and he was here at Twin Fawns Farm.
And if you follow any of the social media, we've highlighted him. quite a bit when he was here and he's with us for almost a year. But he was owned by this lovely woman in Chester County and she had purchased him as , a riding horse to enjoy. And he was turned out and he was galloping across the field and they had a culvert where there was a stream and he slipped and he fell on the concrete and he fractured his shoulder.
Oh wow. And He was kind of worked up very well by another veterinarian in the area who did a great job and Made a diagnosis and the horse didn't have a very good prognosis for you know, even future pasture pet type of an animal. And so they did recommend euthanize them, which was not the wrong recommendation, but this owner was very committed to giving this horse a chance.
So she called me up and told me what was going on. And then. He said, can you take my horse and try to rehab him? And I thought, Oh my God. Well, sure. I definitely, we can I can't make you any promises and we're just going to have to take it literally one day at a time and see how he was.
And to be clear, he was comfortable enough standing in a stall. He was sore, but he was eating, drinking like happy horse, but we weren't trying to keep him alive, with him being very uncomfortable. But that horse, we had the ability to kind of throw everything we could at him. We used functional electrical stimulation, which is a tool that we have.
We used the laser. We did a lot of physical therapy exercises with him. Even just starting with like walking and then walking him over ground poles. We used a variety of different small paddock turnouts. We got him in the treadmill. We worked on his range of motion in the treadmill. We did a couple of joint therapies with him.
But long story short, he's home. He's happy. He gets ridden. And he lives this, super great life. I get videos of him all the time, galloping across the pasture after his other friend. And so, yeah he's not one of my normal ones. Like, he's not this fancy, athletic performance type horse.
And that wasn't really the goal for him. She really just kind of wanted him to be able to be trail ridden and be able to be a horse. And he is now, which is incredible. And once again, speaking back to the mentality and the resilience of these horses, I don't know many horses that would have kind of tolerated that injury and the amount of stall rest and the amount of rehab that it took to really get them back going.
And every step of the way, he was like. I'm going to fight. I'm here to do this. I'm waking up today. I'm going to do the exercises. He was really like, I'm like, I'm feeling emotional about this episode already. Yeah, he was a really special case and it really could have easily gone either way.
But Yeah. He definitely was a daily reminder of the whole patience and resilience and just the mentality that these horses have. And you know, he was also very blessed with the committed owner that was willing to do anything to help them. And we really were able to kind of utilize a lot of the things that we have here.
But yeah, I think he was a true, a true underdog story. So that's amazing. Yeah. That sort of ties into our next question too, which is, How, and you may have answered some of this, but how would you describe the resiliency of OTTBs, both physical and mental? And then how does that influence your work with them?
Yeah. So like I said, I think it is unwavering and because of their resilience, like we had touched upon a little bit earlier, I think looking at them sooner than later for signs of discomfort. And making sure that you really listen, for me, I really listened to the riders and the owners of these horses because some of them will just say, well, it just doesn't seem right, but they look sound.
Everything else seems normal. Me from just seeing the horse every once in a while, I can't find anything wrong with it, but because they are so resilient and tough as Niamh was saying earlier, so I do really listen to the owners if they feel like there's something not right, then we try to figure that out.
And sometimes you have to dig deeper or kind of peel the layers off like an onion and start kind of ruling things in or out. But oftentimes you will. So I think the biggest thing is not giving up too soon when you're looking at them and just saying, Oh, they're, they're fine. Keep carrying on.
So yeah, cause something will crop up for sure. Cause they're pretty tough. Not just going to go away. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if this is a weird thing to say on the podcast, but I feel like there was a An old school kind of thought process when horses were a little off or whatever, it'd be like, we'll just ride them until he's really lame.
And then we'll see what's going on, you know? And not that that was a vet recommended or anything but it was sort of like, well, it's hard to say what's [00:18:00] wrong right now because they're only a little bit off, you know? And I think now it's been really cool, especially 10 or 15 years, just to see how.
How much more there is available to vets and also just hearing you Talk about your interaction with owners It's kind of nice to hear because I think it's horse owners when you're looking at them every day you might notice something really small like you were saying you only see them every couple of months and Sometimes you feel like a crazy person You know, where you're like, yeah, I'm just seeing my horse do this weird thing.
And , I don't know. Then I went on the internet and you're like, Oh God,
I joined a group on Reddit and six hours later, I've diagnosed my horse. Right. I have a couple of different things. Yeah, so I don't know. , I guess what I'm trying to say is that it's very cool to see that even in my short career with horses The evolution of practitioners and owners of being a lot more involved in the care of their animals.
Yeah, and I think we're going to keep seeing that. I think, been a big shift with the social license to practice that you hear kind of discussed a lot in horse sports and how the the public and the public perception of how horses are used in horse sports. And do they think that that's humane or fair or safe to the horses?
I mean, it is really huge because it can essentially shut down. Recreational use of horses and sport, and especially, , in the racing industry and eventing, you know, Olympics type sports. So that's definitely, I think on the forefront of everyone's minds. I think people have horses because they love them.
For most people, it's not a big money making venture. And for veterinarians, I think they've. Really gotten some cool, unique I don't want to call it a gadget, but like the lameness locators that you can have an app now that can help you pick up subtle lameness is that you can't necessarily see with your eye and you can track horses using that, which is neat.
And they've done a lot of studies. Sue Dyson did a great study on the pain ethogram and horses and looking at And horses are ridden if they're doing different behaviors like they have their ears back or tail switching or things like that. If you, have eight or more of those types of behaviors that would indicate that the horse is in pain.
So a lot of these, like you were saying, You know, that older misconception, a little bit of, oh, the horse is just bad, or it's just sour, or it's this or it's that, really were pain issues that kind of went undiagnosed because we thought the horses were being bad. And now we have a lot more science backed data to prove.
That, a lot of the times pain is actually a big underlying thing. So, yeah, it's been a cool shift, even in my career, which has not been very long in comparison to what it will be. Hopefully I think there's been a lot of positive changes, so that's good. Well, during your career and as a competitive rider, I'm sure you saw the need for more rehabilitation focused services.
So what led you to start your wellness center? Yeah. So doing rehabilitation has obviously been a big piece of my day to day practice because we have a sport horse practice. Sport horses, unfortunately get injured and then have to be rehabilitated. So I always wanted to create a rehab center.
I thought I was actually going to do it at Sports Medicine Associates where our practice is. Initially, that was kind of in my mind. My husband and I looked for two years about around Chester County for a farm. I really wanted to have my horses at home. Which now we have a farm and they're not here, but so we looked around quite a bit and it is very expensive for a young professional, whether you're a veterinarian or a horse trainer or whatever, to try to.
Find a farm around here. So we were lucky in that we were able to purchase Bruce Miller's farms about a mile and a half from our clinic. And there was a lot of work here to be done and still is. But it had a lot of good bones. I had a couple barns, and a house, and a walker. So. When we were in the process of purchasing this place, I instantly knew this is the place to kind of do this business.
And it was going to be beneficial to the farm as well because of the amount of work that needed to be done. It was going to be, you know, income producing so that we could turn around and do the improvements that needed to be done. So it's been an incredible adjunct to my career and like my fulfillment and enrichment in veterinary medicine because I absolutely love what I do.
But it is a lot of the same, it's a lot of soft tissue injuries, joint injuries, the same things. And at the rehab center here, we have. So we get a lot of cases from New Bolton Center. I hardly say no to having anything come. So all my friends and colleagues over there are like, yes.
Okay. We're going to send this to Ashley. Exactly. We get some of the more complicated things that need veterinary supervision, but don't necessarily have to be. in the hospital. So it is fun for me because it's like so I'm going to be talking about so I'm going to be talking about a big broad mix of cases as well as some of the things that I love, which is the, the sports medicine stuff too.
So. Before you opened up your wellness center. What was the most local. Point of referral for you guys. So we had a lot of the race horses, fair Hill, Bruce Jackson has a rehab there for the race. He's pretty inundated. With horses at Fair Hill because basically if they get injured, they kind of go straight to him.
So as far as sport horse and [00:24:00] outside horse use it's, it's really impossible to get there. There was another place in Chester Springs that was further away. But a lot of the rehab would be done kind of on the farm by the riders or owners. And then I don't even know what they used to do.
There were a couple layup farms, and still are, and they're wonderful that take cases from New Bolton Center, but I just don't know if maybe they'd end up staying at the hospital longer than Maybe desired. Yeah. Because they would need, we have ones on, you know, on IV medications that have catheters that need to be maintained.
We have horses and splints. Sometimes we have foals that need special care. So yeah, I'm not sure exactly anyone else that would take them quite like that. It's interesting just 'cause this is such a horse centric area with lots of good facilities in terms of vets and hospitals and things like that.
But it, I mean, you really created a little special thing within that industry, which is awesome. Yeah, I don't think I realized it was gonna be like that. I figured it would be. Like, I figured obviously with the cases that I had and some of the other practitioners in the area, it would be a useful service.
But I just started, I took one horse in from New Bolton Center and then it spread like wildfire there. But that's what I was going to start doing. And I had like eight horses in a month and I had one staff member. And so, and Nikki shares one of my good friends, as you know, and she's the ophthalmologist there.
And so she's like, well, I can just. I was going to say, that's very convenient for Nikki. I'm like, great. You know, and I'm just young, starting this young business and I'm like, okay, send whatever. And so for the first three or four months I was doing all the eye meds at night. So I'd have them there during the day, but I was doing the 9 PM and the 1 AM shift every night.
When I would go and work at horse shows, I'd pay someone to come and do them and I'd like sleep so nice at the horse shows and they'd be like, this is not sustainable. So yeah, it's come a long way in a short period of time. We've been here just five years and we built a new building, which is kind of our wellness center and got the water treadmill and you know, some of the other bigger pieces of equipment and And you have a full team now.
We have a full team. Yeah. We have a solid big team of people. We have five full time staff and then, I don't know, probably five part time. And then we have other fill ins that help with IMEDS. So we are fully equipped and one of the things that we say is it is hospital quality care in a home stable environment.
And that's really our goal is we want the horses to feel like they're at home. We're in a traditional barn but the owners can come and brush their horses and take their horses out to graze and interact with them, which is sometimes harder in the hospital. But we have. Almost 24 seven care.
So there's three hours between six and nine that the horses aren't necessarily being looked at. And then three hours from 2am to 5am. So even for the musculoskeletal horses, those horses call it when you lock them in stalls. And so having someone look at them throughout the night , is beneficial because we're usually catching them early.
And then we are so close to new Bolton center. And we just offer transport all the time. So if we have to, we can take them back in there if there's a problem. So that's amazing. Yeah. And probably also amazing for you as a vet to be able to say, you know, if there is an injury that you feel like needs long term care like that, and the, the owner isn't set up or their barn isn't set up to have that easy resource available to them as well as probably amazing.
Yeah. I mean, some of it is just management. It's not that people couldn't do it. At home they absolutely have the capability to, but it is just not having the horse and the burden of their routine care because then the horse, the horses here are quite subtle because they all live in and the ones that kind of can go out in our little bed pens, they all kind of go out together.
And they have a flake of hay for a couple hours in the morning when they come in, but it's not like when you bring the horse home and their routine is like, I go out every day in the big field with my five friends and I see all five of my friends leaving, I don't like it. I don't want to change their routine and coming to the farm here and they're like.
They're smart. They're like, okay, this is what we do every day. That is hugely beneficial for them mentally. So having done the round the clock IMEDS myself, I empathize with, yeah, it's completely life altering. Like for most people they have jobs or even other horses they have to ride or train and.
It's some of these, some of these horses are on seven or eight medications. So that takes like 45 minutes, 50 minutes to do the, just administer all the medications. And then basically it's like three hours till you have to start again. And so forget sleeping, forget working. , it's disrupted. A hundred percent.
I was just reliving that to Niamh during, I think it happened like this past week. It was so cold. This was about, I don't know, almost 10 years ago, but it was a really cold winter. I brought the horse in. Nikki was standing in my barn. And I'm like, Nikki, what's wrong with his eye and the look on her face?
I was like, Oh no, this is bad. Right. Cause normally she's like, no, it'll be fine or yeah, she's pretty chill about stuff for the most part. She's not an alarmist, but she was like, Oh no, yeah, no, that's bad. And she has some people that take the horses home and they say, we'll do it. It is expensive to have them here, which I think people understand why, once they have to do a day of that, but And you're standing [00:30:00] out there for 45 minutes at 1am, freezing, because you're She'll call me and she'll say, Okay, this horse is going to come.
They had it home for, you know, a day or half a day, and they can't do the hymns. The, , the SPL lavage breaks and then they say, I'm out, this is where I'm done. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, those guys, all right, let's switch gears a little bit and talk about some injuries. So, since we're an OTTB focused podcast, we're going to ask these questions as they pertain to thoroughbreds, but of course, feel free to add any information you like let's start with.
What types of injuries do you commonly see in off track thoroughbreds, and how do you address them? Okay, so most of the injuries I see are related to eventing, so I'm gonna have four things that I think are pretty common And not just for thoroughbreds, but for a lot of event horses, but , I am going to kind of pick on thoroughbreds a little bit.
The first thing is foot pain. We see that pretty commonly in thoroughbreds, especially in our event horses based on the terrain that they have to compete on. And in this area, anywhere from May or June until September, October. The ground is really hard. It can get really hard. So they're our president general, just as we know, a little bit of a thinner sold crowd.
So we will see foot pain frequently with them and we combat that a variety of ways, but I think the shoeing. And regular radiographs are really important for our thoroughbreds. So, the ones that are kind of competing in the upper levels, every four months to six months, do just a balancing set of radiographs just to kind of see where their coffin bone is and their hoof capsule.
What kind of soul depth they have. And this really helps our farriers kind of see exactly what's going on in there. The farriers I work with are fantastic in this area and they're super knowledgeable. So it tends to really be a process of us working together and less of me saying, well, I want you to do this or do that.
And more. This is what it looks like. What do you think? And we come up with a plan. Also in some of these cases where I might not know the farrier, if it's a horse that's shipped in from outside of the area, I give the farriers a lot of credit and and I'm always kind of try to find their opinion on cases because they may have tried certain things before with this horse that I think, Oh, we should do this.
And they might say, yeah, it doesn't work for this horse. I've tried that and it made it lamer. So big thing. As far as joint pain, that's probably another common thing that we see in all event horses, but also in off the track thoroughbreds and. That kind of just depends a little bit on how much joint disease the horse kind of had when it started, which sometimes we don't know if they didn't get radiographs on a pre purchase. And sometimes it's, we know that this horse kind of has this wear and tear from racing. So we're going to manage it. And that is. Done in a lot of different ways, whether we do that systemically or inter articularly by injecting the joints and then back pain.
Once again, I know this is a probably big thoroughbred taboo type topic, but I do see back pain a lot in warm bloods and Irish sport horses and all breeds that are kind of having to use their body in sport, but I'd say for me, a lot of the horses that we have that have back pain are very treatable despite what their radiographs say.
So we manage back pain quite a lot in our practice and, and. Do that well, and then a plug for the water treadmill is super been really helpful in a lot of our back pain type. That's amazing. And a lot of horses and some horses radiograph beautifully and have back pain. So the back is more than just the dorsal spines processes. I think that is sometimes forgotten.
And also, a lot of horses that are. Used athletically their back gets sore. We're asking them to collect. We're asking them to use themselves and They're having to carry our load as well. And so they're kind of dealing with that. So yeah, I think back pain in general has a variety of causes but just like in human medicine the stronger the core and the back is the less chance the horse has of developing back pain.
And so that's where I think proper training, riding and conditioning hugely improve back comfort for horses. And the water treadmill has been scientifically proven to improve core strength. And they did a study looking at the hypertrophy or the growth of. The strength in the back muscles and with ultrasound and show that that is a proven way to get that back strong.
So that's something that we utilize a lot. That's amazing. Yeah. So that is kind of a important thing. So yeah, feet, joints, backs, and then just soft tissue injuries. Some of these horses have old soft tissue injuries that we have to kind of follow. And that would be probably more likely than. Maybe a young thoroughbred would have an old tendon versus if you buy a young warmblood, most of those horses haven't had tendon injuries because they haven't had to gallop at speed yet.
So, yeah, exactly. I mean, they won't. They just haven't yet. So yeah, so those are kind of the most common things I think that we deal with. With thoroughbreds, but in my population too of event horses. So how do you feel the success rate is for rehabbing or managing soft tissue injuries in particular?
Yeah, I think it's good, honestly. I [00:36:00] think the veterinary medicine in general has come a long way. We use regeneratives a lot in our practice and the class four laser, and then just kind of the knowledge and experience of Rehabbing these soft tissue injuries. They have for soft tissue. They have these color scans now that they characterize the tissue.
So you can kind of scan the tissue and it will tell you whether it's normal or scar tissue or strange normal tissue. So. We have access to that, which can help when we're rehabbing some of these horses and, you start upping their workload or you take them for a gallop and then you say, okay, I wonder what that looks like.
And you can't necessarily tell an ultrasound, but those scans that will tell you. Oh, you actually have stress tissue now where you didn't before, so, that's great. So it's catching it before it's even truly inflamed. Exactly. Yeah, or what you can necessarily notice on an ultrasound. Wow. So. There's been a lot of advances.
I think, for the most part, there are obviously some soft tissue injuries when they're severe that are career ending for horses. And a lot of times those are probably pre existing, like they've happened before, maybe this is the second time they've happened. There's been something going on for a while, or it was traumatic, like the horse got its leg caught in a fence and, fully lacerated through a tendon, those kinds of injuries, but for the most part, with the right time and management strategies and sometimes the right interventions, a lot of soft tissue injuries are Definitely fixable and may not be fixable to the level that what the horses was competing or doing before, but certainly can have like a good career as a lower level horse you're doing maybe another job.
And so I think it's important to never, I fully write the horses off. I think they all can have a use post-injury for most of 'em. So it's important to remember for sure. Yeah. Listening to you talk about some of this stuff is. Almost like having Kevin in the room as well as I can almost hear his thought process because for somebody who is probably just seen so much and in his career.
He has an optimism about him that I think is really cool. Like when he's talking to you about various injuries and things that can go on with horses, he just has a cool way of both talking about it from a medical standpoint, but also having this built in optimism about the fortitude of horses.
Yeah. I mean, they prove us wrong all the time. And Mostly in a way that when you say they can't do something, they do it. And I've been proven wrong and I love when I get proven wrong in that sense, where I say, oh, the source isn't going to do this job again and says, watch me. But yeah, I mean, I've had some bad injuries myself and so things take a long time and I think that's the biggest thing is time is the one thing that you can't put in a bottle and.
Make happen and give to a horse and or give to a person that's recovering from an injury. And so despite all of the amazing incredible things at our fingertips, they're really good at improving the quality of repair and injuries, but oftentimes they don't actually shorten the time that it's gonna take from point A to point B.
You might have a better repair or a stronger repair at the end, but a lot of the times you're still looking at a long process of rehabbing. And so I always try to make sure my clients are understanding that. Because I think the worst thing that you can do is invest all this time and money and effort into rehabbing a horse.
And then you kind of start pounding a little too fast, too early, and then you end up with a reinjury and then it's devastating for everybody. So yeah. I know you talked about the the AquaTread quite a bit, but are there any particular therapies or techniques that you found effective when rehabilitating off the track thoroughbreds?
Yeah, I kind of had the AquaTread mail written and I talked about it too early. It's in just sparkly letters. Yeah, yeah. I think , the biggest thing is The aqua tread is hugely important. There's physical therapy exercises that you can use like doing carrot stretches to help.
With core strength and coordination and neuromuscular pathway. So we also have these balance blocks that you can stand the horses on. Those I think are really important. And then we do have, a functional electrical stimulation which is almost like a giant tens unit and that actually causes functional contraction and then relaxation of the muscles that can help with muscle building but also helps relieve any muscle spasm by functionally kind of Contracting the muscles so that you don't have all the little nerves kind of going at their own rate and not causing like a functional contraction Those I think are really helpful Because I think we get really wrapped up when we're rehabbing horses a lot of times It's from a limb injury.
And so we do all the things possible for that limb you know we ice it and we bandage it and we laser it and we we do this and we do that and then In the meantime, the horse is standing in the stall and you kind of forget about the rest of the horse. You develop muscle atrophy, some of them develop behavioral issues, anxiety, compensating injuries.
Yeah, exactly. So I think that's the hard thing, too, is that you want to continue to Keep the body kind of toned if you can and that's where some of these things come into play And they've shown in people that it's quite beneficial Doing those kinds of exercises and then just mentally for the horses we try to do enrichment Kinds of things with them to, like, keep them stimulated.
We do have the small pens, which I think are, hugely helpful mentally, [00:42:00] especially for our off the track thoroughbreds that are used to working, and they want to work, and they want to get out of their song, and they want to go outside, and they want to see what's going on. So, you can go out, and we have, these little 16x16 paddocks, and they go out with their flake of hay and their bucket of water, and then all the other, you know,
It's like a retirement home where they're just like shuffling around with their walkers, with their little tennis balls, it keeps that routine that's comforting to them or they eat breakfast in the morning and then they go outside. So it's very much, they feel like they get turned out and the difference is they don't get to go out and run around, but they get to go outside.
And they stand in hopefully the sunshine and have that outdoor time and then they come in. And I think mentally that makes them a lot happier than just literally being in a stall 24 seven, except for the hand walking exercise or the hand grazing or whatever they get to do. So, yeah. Sure. Yeah, and just not being in the sterile environment of a hospital, too.
Yeah, absolutely. That is hard because they obviously have a different setup and a different procedure in a hospital, but they do get to feel a little bit like they're at home here, which is nice. And some of them live here for a long time, so it is their fault. You mentioned earlier about allowing owners to come out and graze them and things like that.
What type of role do you think that the owner or maybe the rider would play in the rehab process and how do you involve them in that? Yeah. So it's different for every person and it's It's not dictated by me, it's dictated by what their desires are. So we have some owners that come out every day and visit their horses and check in and we're very happy to accommodate that.
We have others that are maybe more hands off because they're either far away, they sent their horse to New Bolton for a specialized procedure that one of the surgeons there does and no one in their area has the ability to do, and they live. 6, 7, 8 hours away. So the people that can't be here, we are usually updating them twice a week, unless there's some change for the worse, or sometimes the better.
And we also are kind of open book as far as When the horses come here they don't have to stay for a certain period of time. We're not, oh you have to come for a month, you have to come for two months. Right. Some horses come just for a couple weeks to get over the initial Bandage change or my horse just had colic surgery.
I'm worried. I want to get him a couple of weeks post op before I take him two hours away from new Bolton center. And he maybe has another colic episode. Some people start with that and then the horses do really well and they say, well, we want to keep them there for longer. And so we keep them for longer.
But yeah, I mean, for me, a collaborative approach with the owner, rider, trainer and the veterinarians at home, the farriers at home. It's all a teamwork thing that has been instilled in me just in my personal practice. And we try to really do the same thing here with the horses and keep the owners.
And it's very involved and a lot of the times that the horses are going on the water treadmill or they're getting physical therapy exercises we invite the owners to come watch them on the treadmill, or, you know, they're going to go at this time or we send video, we have one horse that was doing some physical therapy for his knee.
He really didn't have any ability to flex his knee after surgery. And so, every couple of days we're sending videos to his owners who are eight hours away and saying, Look it, you know, it's getting so much better. So yeah, we want people to be a part of it because our success is their success.
And we also all here have horses and know how hard it is sometimes to have your horse injured or even have your horse far away. So yeah, we love for people to be very involved and it is on the occasion and maybe it's a racehorse and sometimes we have racehorses here and the trainers say. Call me in a month, let me know how I'm doing.
So, I've got some others to deal with, but, yeah, like, let me know when I can come pick them up. Exactly, yeah. For most of the horses, the owners pretty involved, if they can be, yeah. Yeah. Well, we have a very special question before we wrap up this portion of the interview. This is from our dear friend, Nikki Shearer.
Hi Nikki and hi Rex. , Nikki's also a vet and an ophthalmologist at New Bolton Center. She's our collective amazing friend that we love dearly. Her question is, let's say you have an OTTB or any horse that doesn't necessarily have any past injuries that we know of. Do you recommend any maintenance or therapies just to keep them feeling good?
That's a good question, Rex. I know Rex asked that question. That came straight from Rex, yeah. Yes. So, I am an Attaquan fan, so a lot of people in our practice, use it because we recommend it. And it's just an intramuscular Joint therapy essentially and It's good just for systemic joint health.
We like to add in legend as well It is expensive to do the both. So a lot of times I'm mostly using the Attaquan Most people have been giving it once a month is what they remember And they've kind of changed that now that you do two loading doses every six months, so that's what we've switched to doing and From kind of my understanding, research, knowledge obviously the product, it's a glucosamine product and glucosamine is a very big molecule, so there are a ton of joint supplements that are oral, feed through supplements that have glucosamine in them, and some of them do get absorbed and get into [00:48:00] the joint, but I think a lot of it ends up in the manure pile because , the small intestine can't actually extract it from the
From the lining and get it into the bloodstream and then get it into the joint. And so that is the big selling point with the Attaquan is that, you're putting it into the horse, the way it needs to go. And then it is polysulfated, which is basically you know chemistry reactions they do to help it basically move into the joint easier than it would if it was just kind of floating on its own and circulation.
So I tend to tell people if they can afford it, like get rid of. I'm sorry if there are any joint supplement people in the audience that promote or sell joint supplements, but I tell people like, get rid of your oral joint supplement and put it into the Attaquan yearly. So that's kind of, that's what I mostly use and recommend.
I'd heard that before. I didn't realize it was due to the size of the molecule. That's really interesting. Yeah. And you did a very good job of explaining that. In a way that I think most people can understand yeah. Yeah. It's too big to get through. Yeah, I know. It makes a lot of sense.
And, and just talking about how, and how they formulated it to make it be more effective is useful. Yeah, how they polysulfate it. So it is. And that's the thing. It is expensive, but it is because it works a little bit like AstroGard, it's, it's so expensive, but yeah, it's same, it works, so there's just, there's too many things that you can buy and feed your horse that maybe aren't doing what you hope that they're doing, so.
I mean, listen, I know we always say on this podcast, if it makes you feel like you can sleep better at night, give your horse, whatever you want, but there is real benefit in working with science and data, and research based. Yeah, be an informed consumer.
Yeah. For sure. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Hey guys, it's Neve here. , just jumping in to say we're actually splitting this episode into two parts. The next part is going to be all about pre-purchase exams. You're not going to want to miss it.
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