Page 57 - May 2016

shockwave therapy and chiropractic care and uses these tech- niques to help horses with back injuries.
“My practice
now is about 95%
chiropractic and
shockwave therapy,
and probably more
than half of what I
do is chiropractic. I
have a large popula-
tion of upper level
performance horses
that I work on at
least once a month, depending on their compe- tition schedule, along with a small number of pleasure horses,” says Johnson.
“For most of these horses, I am seeing them for regular maintenance to keep them at the top of their game,” she says. In other situations, people bring horses to her only if they think the horse has a back problem.
“When I see a horse chiropractically, some people ask if I can just check the horse quickly and see if there’s a problem. Since chiropractic care is all about evaluation of the animal as a whole, I can’t just do a ‘quick check’. I evaluate the entire horse, with rare exception. The goal with chiropractic care is to optimize health and performance - we do that by influencing the nervous system, which controls everything in the body,” she says.
She often gets calls to look at a horse because it has back pain that the owners can’t resolve with traditional modalities. “When I evaluate that horse, first I watch it move. At
a minimum I watch it travel on a lead shank, walking away from me and toward me, trotting
Improper attempts at adjustments could cause serious injury or negatively affect the horse in other ways.
Tia Nelson is a veterinarian and farrier in Helena, Montana.
away from me and toward me on a straight line. I also watch the horse on a serpentine walk and evaluate whether it has a diagonal walk
the way it should (opposite hind and forefoot are moving together) or whether it has a lateral walk (the hind and front on the same side mov- ing together). A lateral walk, in the presence
of several other signs, may be an indication
of sacroiliac pain. A paper presented at the 2014 AAEP (American Association of Equine Practitioners) meeting by Dr. Rob Van Wessum reported on several simple clinical indicators for sacroiliac pain,” Johnson says.
“Sometimes I watch the horses travel on
the lunge line, depending on the horse, and sometimes I watch them working under saddle because I may want to see how they move with a rider. Basically, I am looking for symmetry in the way the horse moves and observing the foot flight path. Are the feet swinging in, swinging out, or tracking straight? Does the movement appear fluid or choppy? Is the horse holding the tail to one side or the other? Is the hind end symmetrical or does one side of the rump drop lower than the other at the trot?” she asks.
“When I begin working on the horse, I start at the head and evaluate the muscles of the jaw, the TMJ joint, and the suture lines of the skull, and check for what are called cranial faults in chiropractic terminology. This gives me a chance to get to know the horse and the horse get to know me, and the horses typically enjoy this work. Many of the chiropractic cranial faults on
the head are related to specific pelvic chiroprac- tic faults, so if I can address these faults on the head, then it frequently makes the adjustments on the pelvis easier,” explains Johnson.
“Then, I go to the back end of the horse and work my way forward. I check for back pain with palpation, and then I evaluate each joint in the pelvis and the vertebral column. I am evaluating for motion up
and down and to left and right. There is
a normal range of motion for each one of those vertebral joints and if it doesn’t move properly, I identify which way it’s not mov- ing and then re-establish that motion with an adjustment. Once I have finished my evaluation and adjustments on the vertebral column, I then evaluate the range of motion of each joint in each leg,” she says.
“Most horses are asymmetric in some way. I suspect that much of this asymmetry starts when they were born. They are squeezed out through the birth canal when everything
in their body is soft and moveable. It’s not unusual to have some movement of the
pelvis out of alignment by the time they get through the birth canal and if it stays that way, the horse can end up with an asymmet- rical pelvis. This is a valid reason for doing
a chiropractic adjustment on foals. If the young horse has an asymmetrical pelvis, the horse will adapt and the body will do what it needs to do as the horse grows up, but a lot of these issues probably start at birth.”
Nelson uses motion palpation to identify spots that may not be moving as they should be, causing the horse discomfort. She brings the joints into tension and then gives them a thrust. She may also use non-steroidal anti-inflammatory drugs to relieve swelling, inflammation and pain,
as well as a combination of therapies, such as acupuncture, to help make the chiropractic adjustments faster and easier.
SPEEDHORSE, May 2016 55
equine health