Page 54 - November 2017

“You want to eliminate as much movement as practically possible in the laminae, including the weight/ downward pressure on those attachments.”
by Heather Smith Thomas
In our October issue, we talked about alleviating laminitis and founder by using the wooden roller shoe designed by Dr. Mike Steward of Shawnee
Animal Hospital in Shawnee, Oklahoma. In this issue, we will look further into this and into causes of founder and methods of treatments.
Laminitis can be a devastating outcome of many different problems. There have been various tech- niques and treatments utilized over the years to try to deal with this condition and to hopefully enable the horse to recover without serious damage to his feet.
“There is a lot of controversy, however, regard- ing how to treat a laminitic or foundered horse,” says Steward, who has treated thousands of horses for laminitis and who is the inventor of the wooden clog that is used today by many veterinarians and farriers to help those horses recover.
“When the coffin bone rotates and the tip comes out the bottom of the foot, most veterinarians used to think they had to put the horse down for humane rea- sons, and some still do, yet we’ve been able to rehab
a lot of those and get them back to normal,” Steward says. “But when the whole bone sinks and/or there is rotation in the back of the foot, it’s very devastating, when compared to the front. This, in my opinion, is because there is an abundance of blood supply, nerves and lymphatics at the back of the foot.
“The blood supply and the lymphatic system in the foot are very important aspects of the complex we call laminitis. Historically, we put laminitic horses in stalls and didn’t let them move around at all, but they must be able to move to facilitate blood supply and workings of the lymphatic system. The foot cannot function properly without this. Most veins in the foot have no valves. If humans don’t have adequate valves in the veins in their legs, they get varicose veins. Movement is vital to encourage blood and lymphatic flow in the hoof, especially in a compromised/dam- aged hoof.
“The reason the veins in the horse’s foot don’t have valves is so blood can easily flow around the foot; it is a hemodynamic system. If the horse lands on the side of the foot, the blood can squirt to the other areas of the foot. The hemodynamic system of the foot is like a water-filled balloon; when the foot strikes the ground
with great force (about 15,000 pounds of pressure), the fluid is a tremendous shock absorber. When you mea- sure the pressure inside a normal foot when it strikes the ground, however, the inside pressure is zero.”
A horse’s foot is a complex system that works incredibly well when the foot is normal. When the foot is abnormal, however, there will be some over- loading stress in places there shouldn’t be.
“When people bring me horses with very distorted feet, I don’t really know what to do except make those feet look as normal as possible,” says Steward. “A foot that is not a normal shape cannot function normally. It’s an intricate engineering system and when you start changing it, something else will change in response. You might get away with it for a few years, but eventually you’ll usually wish it was a normal- looking foot.”
When Steward works on a laminitic horse, he tries to get the foot conformationally back toward normal. He uses a wooden shoe, screwing the wood to the hoof, to help it function normally.
“There are many ways to do what I do, to relieve pressure on the horse’s foot,” he says. “In Magner’s Classic Encyclopedia of the Horse, published in 1887, there was just one half page on laminitis or foundered
TREATING
FOUNDERED
HORSES, PART 2
Heather Smith Thomas
Using screws is less painful than the concussion of driving nails into an already sore hoof. Steward uses the wooden shoe to try to regain conformation
in a less painful manner.
52 SPEEDHORSE, November 2017
EQUINE HEALTH