Soft tissue damage in the caudal hoof - what options beside BF?

Meowy Catkin

Meowy Catkin

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Not my horse BTW.

This horse has been lame intermittently for months. He's also had bucking problems during this time and has trouble walking up/down hills. He's been off work due to his problems for a fair while.

Nerve blocks located the problem to the fore hooves. I might get permission from the owner to post x-rays, but as there were no bony changes the vet has diagnosed soft tissue damage. They have asked for egg bars to be fitted, but the horse's farrier isn't keen on EB and is reluctant to fit them. The Vet and Farrier are going to discuss the options.

The owner knows that if the horse was mine, I'd go down the BF road, but she wants to know if there are any other remedial shoeing options? Heart bars? Imprints? Something else?
 
If its anything like my mare had, which was picked up by MRI, then egg bar shoes were recommended for her too. She had a tear to her DDFT within the hoof and also inflammation in the navicular bursa. She had the egg bars on for around 12 months and then went back into quarter clip shoes. This was in 2009 and she was lucky to come sound. I just use her for hacking now and she loves this.
 
Mine and two friend's horse went down the remedial farriery route, various shoes were tried Eggbars, wide webs, wedges, shoes shaped and balanced to provide support, carbon fibre heel supports.
Other treatments tried were drug treatments Cartrophen, Adequan, Navilox.

Other treatments sometimes tried are Tildren or IRAP.

Unfortunately unsuccessful in all cases. We ended up going down the BF route and all came sound. (mine subsequently had a career ending injury to his shoulder but that's tbs for you)

There was a paper published a few years ago http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/21039796
on the success rates of remedial farriery and drug treatements. I have see the full paper and when you look at the different types of injury then soft tissue damage is worse than the overall percentage ranging from about 10% with damage to thecollateral ligament to 22% with DDFT and 26% DSIL back to previous level of work.

You may want to point your friend in the direction of that research to help her make a decision.
 
Mine is supposed to have egg bars on, but pulls them off usually within 2 weeks, so we now put a raised heel pad under a normal shoe which also runs over the back of the frog to still provide some support to the frog/heel area and raise it.

This has been working well (touch wood!)

Good luck!
 
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