criso
Coming over here & taking your jobs since 1900
Even when they do follow up, they don't necessarily go into that level of detail.
I'm in the interesting postion of having a horse that appears in 2 research projects, the Rockley one and a follow up of the sort of retrospective studies you mention at the hospital where the MRI was carried out.
For Rockley he was assessed by the same vet, using the same criteria, at the same place where he had been assessed regularly during 2 years of lameness. No one is in a postion to fund a new MRI so we can't compare that so that was the best we could do to try and get an objective assessment of his progress.
The hospital sent me a questionnaire. I was asked to assess his level of lameness against a scale at different points, e.g. before the MRI, after 6 months, 12 months.
Even assuming I am experienced enough to accurately assess a lame horse especially the sort of low level bilateral lameness you can get with foot problems, there is no guarantee I am using the same criteria as my vet.
Nowhere did it ask what treatment was followed (in his case remedial farriery and assorted drug therapies) and because it had a 12 month cut off, it didn't really get the true outcome. I did do my best to give them as much information as I could as accurately as I could but I;m not sure scientific studies should depend on my opinion.
At best all you are going to get from that is rough percentages of horses coming back into work after similar MRIs, nothing to tell you which if any of the treatments recommended worked.
- if only all vets were this practical - having had one vet wanting to do £3.5k worth of tests on an injury we agreed was a groin strain and which ultimately resolved to full soundness in 48 hours without bute. Why?