How does barefoot "cure" navicular disease?

[TPO]

I've read numerous posts on here over the years stating that going barefoot can bring a horse lame with navicular sound.

Could anyone please elaborate as despite numerous searches I can't find any proof or evidence of this? Yes I’ve seen the videos and pictures but are there x-rays, scans etc showing improvement in the structure of the foot?

I appreciate that going barefoot can help in many cases of lameness where the hoof is unbalanced and/or of poor quality. I can see how rebalancing the hoof by going barefoot can/could/would help with navicular syndrome when tendons and bursa, for example, are involved but how does it help with true navic disease?

When there is advanced navicular and lesions on the navic bone how exactly does being unshod cure the lameness and ease the pain/discomfort caused by the disease? Are there any x-rays of true navic horses with lesions on the navic bone before and after barefoot rehab? Has the bone regenerated? If so why isn’t this finding more widespread?

If the horse already has well balanced and healthy feet in shoes how/why/what does transitioning the horse to barefoot improve/change?

I’m not anti-barefoot; I believe each horse is an individual. I’ve used an EP once previously (trained, qualified & registered; but that experience alone has put me off ever using a “trimmer” again) BUT I am interested in learning, anatomy and I do try to keep an open mind. I am very interested in hoof health and conformation.

I’ve had discussions at great length with different vets and farriers about navicular disease. I’ve seen horses with navicular (don’t know if disease or syndrome) go barefoot and be crippled but the rider/owner has carried on regardless purely on the basis that it’s “natural” and therefore better and having read success stories from various websites believing it to be a “cure all”. This is not a reflection on being barefoot/unshod just shows how some people do things without enough knowledge and/or information.

So are there x-rays out there? Has anyone got a horse that has dumbfounded vets with its recovery from navicular disease? Has anyone sent (or done at home under the guidance of a vet and a “trimmer”) their horse for barefoot rehab for navic and not had good results?

I’ve looked on some rehab websites but in the majority of cases these horses have really bad feet to begin with (I wonder how some of them managed to walk!) and the care of the rehab has greatly improved this and subsequently other areas of discomfort, like secondary back pain. What if the horse already has good, healthy & balanced feet? However on these sites I’ve never seen x-rays of the navicular bone or even MRI scans for horses where DDFT or bursa is involved showing befores and afters.

Not wanting an argument, or even a debate, just information and others to share their experiences for the good or bad.

Thank you in advance

Apologies for any spelling and grammar mistakes as I’m typing this on the sly at work in drips and drabs.

 

[ThePony]

I would suggest you call Rockley and discuss project Dexter with them. http://www.rockleyfarm.co.uk/RockleyFarm/Home.html
They are the guys in the know so I won't even attempt a poor reply here, they are the people to approach!

 

[TPO]

I would suggest you call Rockley and discuss project Dexter with them. http://www.rockleyfarm.co.uk/RockleyFarm/Home.html
They are the guys in the know so I won't even attempt a poor reply here, they are the people to approach!

Thanks for taking the time to reply.

I've read on their site and seen the project horses being used. Would feel I was wasting their time calling as I'm not looking to send a horse there or a vet/EP etc to be able to discuss anything in depth. I'm led to believe it will be published soon so am happy to wait.

I would be interested to know if there are before/after scans and x-rays and if any improvements in lesions on the navic bone were found in the study.

Also, could be getting my sites mixed up as looked at a few, but didn't all the horses in the test group have poor hoof balance and quality prior to going to Rockley? Would assume (dangerous I know!) that improving the hoof balance, shod or not, in feet that bad would make improvements in their way of going regardless but did it improve the navicular affected structures?

Thanks again

 

[MerrySherryRider]

Very interesting post. I have a horse that was diagnosed with navicular syndrome shortly after purchase. I was strongly advised by my vet and specialist farrier not to go barefoot, which I would have preferred if possible.However, she is now sound and in full work,and the behavioural problems she exhibited have ceased. My other two horses are barefoot, so I'm certainly not anti.
Like you, I would be interested in seeing evidence that barefoot trimming is a better option, but wonder why the vet and farrier are so adamant, when the latest research is available to them.

 

[amandap]

Have you seen this article it sights research (some of which has incidentally been around a while) and I'd also recommend the navicular DVD on Pete Ramey's Under the Horse DVD series. Along with the other info on this series the navicular causes described was a light bulb moment for me and ties together competely the dietry and management advice that is so critical in the holistic barefoot approach.
http://www.hoofrehab.com/NavicularSyndrome.htm

I know the term navicular covers many things so I imagine in the end what is 'best' for a particular horse has to be a decision made by the owner and other professionals involved. Barefoot option is sometimes a huge change for owners so you have to be prepared to take this on board and put in the effort.

 

[LucyPriory]

Not heard of anyone claiming that barefoot repairs damage to the navicular bone. Can you provide any links?

What I have seen being claimed is that barefoot can help with cases of navicular syndrome.

I agree with OP that it is unfortunate that people try barefoot without proper experience or support. It is more than taking the shoes off.

Most cases of navicular syndrome seen do involve feet which are in poor condition which is why for some people this particular diagnosis is problematic.

 

[amandap]

Not heard of anyone claiming that barefoot repairs damage to the navicular bone. Can you provide any links?

Better just clarify here. Repair of damage to the bone isn't claimed on the link I put up. It explains a possible mechanism of how the bone eventually becomes damaged.

 

[TPO]

Very interesting post. I have a horse that was diagnosed with navicular syndrome shortly after purchase. I was strongly advised by my vet and specialist farrier not to go barefoot, which I would have preferred if possible.However, she is now sound and in full work,and the behavioural problems she exhibited have ceased. My other two horses are barefoot, so I'm certainly not anti.
Like you, I would be interested in seeing evidence that barefoot trimming is a better option, but wonder why the vet and farrier are so adamant, when the latest research is available to them.

I was in a similar position to you.

Long story but the short version is ended up buying a QH with navic unvetted to “save” her. She was sound at the viewing but lame a week after arriving with us (from Liverpool). I had a different vet at the time who advised to keep her in work, shod in front, give her danolin and breed from her!! Needless to say not my vet any more and didn’t follow his “advice”!

It was because of her that I started looking into navicular in more depth which led me to barefoot. I tried an EP but her advice and trimming left a lot to be desired. I done everything I could for the transitioning, she had hoof boots and pads and her diet was modified, but she was lame/in pain/uncomfortable which could be attributed to being trimmed far too short IMO.

I changed vet practice and new vets advised wedged eggbars and gradually reduce to flat eggbars as due to foot angle she needed help to compensate and not to be left “as nature intended”. He said they would either work or she would say no to the change. Thankfully they worked and she returned sound but she was never brought into work at any point; field sound was enough for us. I lost her a year past at the end of this month just because after 2 good years it all seemed to catch up with her when the weather changed and I didn’t want to see her suffer or uncomfortable.

Then I had a TB mare who I lost in June due to very advanced navicular. The vet could offer no options other than denerving or doping her to the eyeballs and carrying on regardless; not options that I wished to pursue. She had good foot balance and excellent horn quality. I discussed trying barefoot or remedial shoeing with the vet but the conclusion was that there was nothing that could be done to repair the navicular bone as it was very advanced.

The reason I’m asking these questions now is that my TB had been in the vet hospital in March for a full work up as she wasn’t quite right. She was passed sound with no issues and I was told to bring her into work. At that time, due to losing my QH, the TB was in livery outside of my usual vet’s catchment area. I returned, with a companion, to the old yard I rented and got my vets out in the June for a work up. Nerve blocks confirmed palmar foot pain so she was taken into their clinic for x-rays and a more thorough investigation. He estimated that the navicular must have been developing for at least 9mths so it had been missed by several people in that time.

So just looking for another whip to flog myself with in that if it had been caught earlier and I’d pursued barefoot/unshod could the navic bone have been repaired/regenerated and if so where is the evidence? In another post on here a user said the navic bone does regenerate itself so I’m looking for proof of that as I’ve had no joy finding anything even close to that on line.

 

[criso]

Hi TPO

Mine is one of the horses at rehabbed at Rockley (Frankie), if you don't want to drop them an email, have a look on the blog and search, as well as the rehab updates there are lots of articles discussing the theory of what they are doing.
This page is probably a good place to start.

http://rockleyfarm.blogspot.com/p/hoof-information.html
I'm sure you can find something there that takes you through the theory of how incorrect foot balance put undue stress on the soft tissues and supporting structures of the foot which in term leads to bone stress and deterioration.

There is also one of the horses there that did show improvement on an xray though he predates project dexter so isn't part of that.
http://rockleyfarm.blogspot.com/2010/02/reversing-navicular-bone-damage.html


In our case he did not have any changes that showed up on an xray but the MRI showed soft tissue damage and referred to the beginnings of bone stress caused by his other problems though no navicular disease yet.


In terms of follow up MRI's, the problem is that MRIs are so expensive (£1000+) and insurance doesn't cover follow ups so you don't get a chance to compare before and after with any treatment.

I would have liked 2 more MRIs, 1 after the box rest and tradtional treatments to see if there had been improvement and one after barefoot rehab to see how everything looked.


Frankie did have terrible feet, however what you don't see on the blog is how they looked when he first went lame (about 18 months before I sent him there) his feet were not nearly as bad as they were after 18 months of on off box rest and remedial farriery.
Once things started going wrong we were on a downward spiral with his feet getting worse and none of the traditional approaches helped. I started taking photos each time he was shod so I could track the improvement but instead ended up documenting the deterioration.

I think I'm probably fairly typical in that I went with a traditional approach first and it was when that clearly wasn't working that I looked for an alternative. Given that, the horses you see on the blog tend to be the worst cases for which nothing else has worked. So yes you see some pretty bad feet but others I saw there had feet that really didn't look too bad at all but what they do have in common is that they are all landing incorrectly and the ones that had fairly good feet to start off with grew even better feet.


As for my vet and farrier's opinion, they were very sceptical but at the time he was not even staying field sound so it was either that or pts, now it seems to have worked I think they regard Frankie as some bizarre freak of nature who has spontaneously grown different hooves (both shape and hoof quality) and improved. I guess you have to see it working again and again for yourself to change a long held belief.
It did amuse me the other day watching my farrier struggle to trim him as the horn is now so hard.

 

[TPO]

The bone repairing itself is from post no. 9 on this thread

http://www.horseandhound.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=382370

 

[criso]

TPO you can't beat yourself up about it now.

We can all sit there and think if only and I often wonder where I would be now if I had spotted that Frankie's foot balance was off and addressed it before he went lame.
He's a horse that will always need careful management and while his feet are pretty good now, they would have been better if I'd taken him barefoot at 5 not 7.

What I take from it is any horse I have now and in the future will have a close eye (obsessive maybe ) kept on its landing and feet so that I can spot problems before they develop.

Just as an aside - you mention that after a bad experience you would be reluctant to use a trimmer again which is understandable.

I just wonder though what response I would get if I posted here that after a bad experience I would never use a farrier again. I've had 3 that have left my horse lame after a shoe/trim.

 

[TPO]

Criso - thanks. Not so much beating myself up as still feel I made the right decision for her at the time; just wish it hadn't come to that. More want to beat up the chief vets at the vet school who missed it and the vet (at new yard) who seen her prior to that (and diagnosed KS which she incidently did not have)!! Also wishing something had been noticed 6-9mths prior to that day when perhaps more options would have been available.

I guess with a farrier I feel more confident that they have spent longer training and as an apprentice and if it should go wrong there are regulatory bodies that you can report back to. As far as I'm aware there are no laws governing trimmers.

I'm not anti-barefoot and its something I consider from time to time and would just like more information in general specifically in relation to navicular disease.

I just feel that if the navic bone can/does remodel and regenerate then surely there must be some proof as it would be a bit of a breakthrough to say the least, no?!

 

[LucyPriory]

The bone repairing itself is from post no. 9 on this thread

http://www.horseandhound.co.uk/forums/showthread.php?t=382370

Ah yes - I know something of the Campero story. He had navicular syndrome and has indeed was 24 hours from PTS when taken on. He is I believe now very sound and very happy.

It is easy sometimes I think for a poster to a) write in haste and b) for everyone to have a slightly different take on what was written

I read the post referred to as simply asking why navicular bones can not be repaired, rather than claiming that they can be fixed through any particular approach.

What is now more often, although not universally recognised, is that the damage to the DDFT happens first, and this if not resolved, then impacts (and damages) the navicular bone.

Also recognised by some but not all is that if you radiographed 1,000's of horses you would find that there are huge variations in the appearance of the navicular bone and that an 'unusual' appearance is not directly linked with lameness. It is just 'unusual'.

The barefoot approach seeks to restore a correct balance to the foot which relieves the causal factor which is damaging the DDFT. However it is often more simple than that.

Navicular syndrome is often used instead of the equally popular phrase 'caudal heel pain'. And in some people's experience this can be resolved very satisfactorily at home without injections, remedial shoeing or otherwise.

It is a minefield because the expertise is there, but not necessarily the wisdom to appreciate it.

 

[TPO]

Thank you for your reply LucyP.

Do you know of any cases of actual navicular disease that have been improved going barefoot? More so if foot was well balanced prior to removing the shoes.

Thanks again to everyone who's taken the time to reply.

 

[LucyPriory]

I am aware of improvements with horses having 'syndrome' but not 'disease'.

But just right now, I personally am majorly cautious regarding any diagnosis with the word 'navicular' in front because it has become a catch all for any pain in the foot which is a mystery.

It is often written/heard that 'sorry' is the hardest word to say

Closely followed IMO by the phrase 'I don't know'

 

[criso]

I know what you mean about spotting things earlier. Mine was losing shoes fortnightly and I was worried about his feet. My farrier told me I had just been unlucky and his feet were fine. 9 months later he was on total box rest with a guarded prognosis.

If you subscribe to the view that soft tissue damage (with us it wasn't only the ddft but other structures) precedes and results in bone damage then you are talking about different stages of progression of the same condition so making a differentiation between disease and syndrome can be misleading especially when you add in the flexibility with which different vets use the terms. Plus as Lucypriory says the correlation between bone changes and lameness isn't as clear as you might expect.

What you do come to is at what point in that progression is the damage so advanced that even if it is stopped at that point and helped, it will not be enough to make the horse comfortable and able to function.

One of the links I added refers to a horse whose navicular bone did improve but unless you have dozens of horse documented in controlled condtions showing proof one way or the other most vets/farriers are not going to question what they already believe and that documentation is a way off.

Otherwise they have the attitude that mine have which is that I've been lucky.

Reading that back I realise alot of the professionals that have dealt with us talk alot about luck - good and bad.

Actually I use the same principle for vets, back people, saddle fitters and farriers or trimmers and that is go on personal recommendation rather than go on qualifications. With trimmers you do have to do more checking to see who they are affilated with and what sort of standards and training they have gone through. I'm actually still using my old farrier because I have had advice about nutrition and exercise elsewhere and just need him to tidy every couple of months and none of the trimmers I was recommended covered my area.

I've seem some vets I wouldn't let near my horse despite the weight of regulatory bodies and letters after their name. How may of us report professionals anyway or just get someone else.

 

[amandap]

The thing I've learned from my reading and study of holistic, non invasive barefoot approach (an as owner) is that if the hoof is helped to get truely healthy and stronger then many symptoms can be helped and improved. This of course requires looking at the horse as a whole, what he eats, how often and where he moves, his mental state etc. etc. All these things impact on the hoof and horses feet seem often to be protected so much that they don't develop enough with the added problems of reduced continual exercise, high sugar/carb energy diet and untreated things like deep thrush infection. All these interact and contribute to cause the horse to walk in a manner to compensate and so further protect any compromised or sore parts of the hoof by putting the foot on the ground in an unnatural way for the horse, think about how you walk if you've got a sore toe for eg. Loading the toe area seems to be a common way horses protect a sore back half of the foot, so continues a cycle where the foot is not used/worked properly to build strength which further leads to poor development and problems possibly higher up in the body from unnatural tension coming from an unnatural gait.

So for me the often quoted 'no foot no horse' is so very true. The foot is a relection and cause of things wrong in the body. Hooves are part of the horse not something to be looked at in isolation...

Apologies for the babble.
I seem to remember reading somewhere that bone can remineralize to some degree sometimes and also bone needs pressure/weight on it otherwise it begins to leach minerals. This is one of the reasons long bedrest for humans is mostly a thing of the past. So I'm also wondering how much the horse not weighting the back of it's foot also leads to bone demineralization from lack of normal pressures exerted when the horse is moving as he was meant to. Just thinking out load here btw.

 

[cptrayes]

QUOTE
Could anyone please elaborate as despite numerous searches I can't find any proof or evidence of this? Yes I’ve seen the videos and pictures but are there x-rays, scans etc showing improvement in the structure of the foot?

REPLY
I couldnt' care less whether my rehab has righted the damage to his navicular bones or not, and neither could he. The evidence is a sound horse, not the xrays. My vet once told me that in any large livery stable, around 50% of the horses, if xrayed, woudl show abnormalities in the navicular bone but very few of them will be unsound. The link between navicular damage and presence or severity of lameness is by no means conclusive.

QUOTE
I appreciate that going barefoot can help in many cases of lameness where the hoof is unbalanced and/or of poor quality. I can see how rebalancing the hoof by going barefoot can/could/would help with navicular syndrome when tendons and bursa, for example, are involved but how does it help with true navic disease?

REPLY
I think you use "true navicular disease" to describe damage to the navicular bone, assuming that this damage is causing the lameness? In fact, in cases where MRI can be afforded, there is nearly always damage to soft tissues, which in research can be show to PRECEDE the navicular bone damage, which is only a symptom. From the rate of coming sound (often around 3 months) it's clear that the pain "navicular syndrome" horses are suffering is from soft tissue damage, not from the bones, no matter what the x rays show.


QUOTE
If the horse already has well balanced and healthy feet in shoes how/why/what does transitioning the horse to barefoot improve/change?

REPLY
Because the feet which have been so beautifully balanced as a farrier wants to see them are NOT the feet which the horse wants to grow for himself to match the less than perfect legs and body which lie above them. Being forced to be in an unnatural, albiet perfect in our eyes, balance causes strains elsewhere in the foot and the body.

QUOTE
I’ve had discussions at great length with different vets and farriers about navicular disease. I’ve seen horses with navicular (don’t know if disease or syndrome) go barefoot and be crippled but the rider/owner has carried on regardless purely on the basis that it’s “natural” and therefore better and having read success stories from various websites believing it to be a “cure all”. This is not a reflection on being barefoot/unshod just shows how

REPLY
The people you have seen do this unfortunately do not know what they are doing I get really mad when I hear about people like this because they bring barefoot into disrepute when it has so much to offer so many horses and owners in this country!


QUOTE
So are there x-rays out there? Has anyone got a horse that has dumbfounded vets with its recovery from navicular disease?

There are dozens of us with horses that have dumbfounded the vets and farriers who said that they could do no more for them. So if the x-rays show change or not, who cares? My own had adequan, tildren, hyaluronic acid and bar shoes and was still too lame to provide him a quality of life which his owner felt was worth living.


QUOTE
What if the horse already has good, healthy & balanced feet?

REPLY
If the horse is lame with issues inside the foot, he DOESN'T have good healthy balanced feet no matter how pretty they look. Nic Barker has a number of examples of horses where they have grown what look like very unbalanced feet but are sound, whereas with "balanced" feet in shoes, they are unsound. The horse knows what it needs. Barefoot allows him to create the foot he needs, not the one we think he should have.

 

[quizzie]

The problem with all of this is summed up in the phrase " clinical signs may not correlate with diagnostic findings" !!!.

ie: nerve blocks may indicate a site of pain, but are far less precise in dictating which part of the foot is painful than was once believed......

X-rays show bony changes, but little in the way of soft tissue detail......they do not tell you if the changes you can see are painful.....

MRI scans show enormous detail, of both bone & soft tissue structures, but again they do not tell you which changes are significant in the current episode of lameness, or which are old changes,....so interpretation is vital....& difficult!

Because there are so many structures potentially involved in navicular "syndrome", there are many possible treatments & even more possible outcomes.....so at the end of the it is down to a combination of treating each case individually..........what some respond to, others won't, but inevitably "luck" will come into it

Good luck with yours.....I have been there!

 

[MerrySherryRider]

Soooo, no one has produced x rays or MRI scans showing the before and 'after' pictures of a horse treated by barefoot trimmers ?
Evidence of correctly done research certainly does matter to owners of navicular horses. If no evidence has been produced, anecdotal accounts are of little help other than to give support.

 

[amandap]

Anecdotal and lame horses becoming sound actually is evidence erm, isn't it?

I think others have tried to explain the difficulty with diagnosis and that when bony changes have taken place there's no 'cure'...
Here's something from James Rooney you might find helpful. If you go to the homepage (linked at the bottom of the page) you'll get an idea of all his research.
http://www.horseshoes.com/farrierssites/sites/rooney/navicular/navicular.htm

 

[cptrayes]

Soooo, no one has produced x rays or MRI scans showing the before and 'after' pictures of a horse treated by barefoot trimmers ?
Evidence of correctly done research certainly does matter to owners of navicular horses. If no evidence has been produced, anecdotal accounts are of little help other than to give support.

It's as shame that this sounds so negative and even potentially sarcastic. The evidence you are looking for is either in peer review at the moment or will be shortly and should be published in the near future. For an interim report, look at Project Dexter on rockleyfarm.co.uk for the study which has been done in conjunction with Liverpool University.

But I repeat. There are now tens, dozens and quite probably more than a hundred horses in the "navicular" spectrum (in this country and certainly hundreds including the US) who are in full work barefoot when they had been failed by tildren, adequan, shockwave, irap, remedial shoeing, hyaluronic acid and probably more. Those horses are sound and I think you'll find that other navicular spectrum horse owners have found their stories "inspiring" rather than "little more than supportive", especially given just how many of them there now are and how many different people have been responsible for achieving what the vets and farriers of these horses could not.

WHAT THE HELL DOES IT MATTER WHAT THE SCANS AND RADIOGRAPHS SAY WHEN THESE HORSES ARE ALIVE WHEN THEY WERE EXPECTED TO BE PUT TO SLEEP, AND FULLY WORKING WHEN THEY WERE EXPECTED TO BE NO MORE THAN A PADDOCK ORNAMENT?

 

[MerrySherryRider]

WHAT THE HELL DOES IT MATTER WHAT THE SCANS AND RADIOGRAPHS SAY WHEN THESE HORSES ARE ALIVE WHEN THEY WERE EXPECTED TO BE PUT TO SLEEP, AND FULLY WORKING WHEN THEY WERE EXPECTED TO BE NO MORE THAN A PADDOCK ORNAMENT?

Actually it does. Research scientifically verified is how treatments are decided. Its not just about horses today, but knowing how to treat in future. Thats why in the modern world we no longer go to sooth sayers and quacks for out medical care. Anecdotal evidence is simply not enough for decision making. There needs to be unbiased research.
I have no problem in showing the before and after scans of my bone tumour. Thanks to research in the field,I am sound again.

 

[amandap]

Fair enough but Xrays and MRI's are not necessarily diagnostic never mind able to be used as evidence of cure in navicular as far as I can find out.
'Navicular' isn't one disease/condition or syndrome is it? It will be interesting when Rockley's research is published but I rely on my common sense and what makes sense to me in the face of lack of conclusive evidence. I make the best decision I can for my horses based on this as well as professional advice. I'm not going to wait for a scientific study to explain what I see with my own eyes if my horse is suffering today!

I can understand your view horserider but for me science isn't the whole story or truth. Yet.

Mta. Science is done by Human's so is inherently fraught with Human perceptions and less than perfect objectivity anyway.

 

[MerrySherryRider]

Anecdotal and lame horses becoming sound actually is evidence erm, isn't it?

I think others have tried to explain the difficulty with diagnosis and that when bony changes have taken place there's no 'cure'...
Here's something from James Rooney you might find helpful. If you go to the homepage (linked at the bottom of the page) you'll get an idea of all his research.
http://www.horseshoes.com/farrierssites/sites/rooney/navicular/navicular.htm

Anecdotal cases are not evidence.
I am familiar with james Rooney's hypotheses. Again, not evidence of a successful treatment, but observations based on his work, as he himself says.

 

[henryhorn]

Well we have had horses retire here with navicular who arrive lame and after 6 months are near enough sound 99% of the time.
They get trimmed rarely (think every 3 to 6 months) and their feet wear naturally into a shape and go rock hard without shoes.
I attribute their improvement down to dry ground with undulating pasture, their joints are moving much much more than they ever would on a normal flat field.
Quite how it works other than constant exercise improves them I don't know, but I can promise you I have seen it happen at least 10 and more times over the years, so something works..

 

[MerrySherryRider]

Fair enough but Xrays and MRI's are not necessarily diagnostic never mind able to be used as evidence of cure in navicular as far as I can find out.
'Navicular' isn't one disease/condition or syndrome is it? It will be interesting when Rockley's research is published but I rely on my common sense and what makes sense to me in the face of lack of conclusive evidence. I make the best decision I can for my horses based on this as well as professional advice. I'm not going to wait for a scientific study to explain what I see with my own eyes if my horse is suffering today!

I can understand your view horserider but for me science isn't the whole story or truth. Yet.

Mta. Science is done by Human's so is inherently fraught with Human perceptions and less than perfect objectivity anyway.

I agree with much of what you say, and yes, as owners, we can only do what we think is best. Thats why I was interested in this thread. Happily my mare is now shod,sound and a totally different animal to 6 months ago, but I am looking to the future for her. I want her to be sound for many years to come which is why I want to know why so little evidence is forthcoming, while so many 'navicular' sites on the web are barefoot sites with nothing but nice stories. Maybe true,maybe embellished, maybe untrue. I don't know.
Why no independant research advocating barefoot trimming for these horses ?

 

[cptrayes]

Actually it does. Research scientifically verified is how treatments are decided. Its not just about horses today, but knowing how to treat in future. Thats why in the modern world we no longer go to sooth sayers and quacks for out medical care. Anecdotal evidence is simply not enough for decision making. There needs to be unbiased research.
I have no problem in showing the before and after scans of my bone tumour. Thanks to research in the field,I am sound again.

This is rubbish, sorry. Aspirin works because it works. It has always worked, from when women were advised to chew willow bark for period pains hundreds of years ago. Just because something has not been tested does not mean that it does not work. Just because it is anecdotal does not mean it is incorrect. And remember, there is no placebo effect with a lame horse. The treatment either worked and the horse is sound, or it did not and they remain unsound. For most cases this is outcome is binary, countable, independently verfiable and becomes evidence through sheer weight of numbers.

Plenty of people on this forum and elsewhere have gone against the advice of their vets and farriers and produced cures for navicular horses which the experts said could not be done. And they did this because of the anecdotal evidence you seem to so despise.

This is impressive enough in its own right, but it is downright gobsmacking when you take into account that all these horses have already been failed by the best medicine and farriery that could be thrown at them.

Why are you so intent on seeing scans? Why is seeing sound horses not enough? It's all that matters to the horse and its owner, what the devil does it matter what the scan shows if the horse is 100% sound? What owner in their right mind pays another £1000 for a repeat MRI on a sound horse?

There are dozens of us riding these condemned horses now. How many will it take to convince you that you should open your mind a little further?

If you would like to give me £200 I will gladly have my navicular rehab re-xrayed for you. As it is, he cost me hundreds of pounds in food and care to save from his appointment with a lethal injection and since he is now with new carers who are hacking him out for over two hours, jumping and competing well placed in dressage competitions, I fail to see any logic as to why I should pay for those xrays to satisfy someone's curiosity to see them when the horse is as sound as a pound. I'll show you the "before" xrays and the "after" horse with pleasure.

How many sound horses would satisfy you? A hundred. We have those. A thousand? You'll get those in time. Whether you want to believe it yet or not, this treatment works and more and more owners are turning to it. More impressively, it works when all else has failed. And that's more than anecdotal, sound horses who were previously unsound can be counted and independently verified. You pay the vet and they can come and tell me that my rehab is sound by all means. It is performance that counts, not pictures.

If you want research, how much money are you prepared to stump up for it? Because sure as hell no drug company is going to fund research into a cure that requires no medication and no clever bits of metal. So who will, you? We'd all love to see it done, so bring on that philanthropist millionaire that we need.

 

[criso]

I don't think there is any willingness to fund follow up MRI's for any treatments at the moment - they are just too expensive. Today I got a questionnaire from the clinic where the MRI was done. They are carrying out research following up horses. No talk of MRIs or even vets assessment, just asking for my subjective assessment of his progress.

As I said before it would have been fantastic to have various MRIs along the way to see exactly what has happened inside his foot but it wasn't financially possible.

 

[Orangehorse]

Didn't Ghost have some follow-up X rays? I seem to remember something.

Ghost was one of the first horses at Rockley Farm,a horse that had been retired with navicular and then with treatment became sound and stayed sound and working until earlier this year when he was PTS at the age of 25 due to another condition,not foot related.