Page 128 - September 2015

trigger point in the shoulder and another in the girth area that are related to front foot pain,”
he says. These are some of the trigger points Connally uses when looking for discomfort and dysfunction.
“My main purpose in using acupuncture is to treat pain. I don’t use acupuncture for treat- ing liver dysfunction, constipation or many other things some veterinarians use it for. I am mainly an orthopedic acupuncturist and I do it with trigger points,” he says.
“A book written by a medical doctor named Mark Seem discusses osteopathic acupuncture (trigger point acupuncture) and this book really hit home with me and that’s what sent me down this road.”
A horse he recently treated with acupunc- ture had back pain and was bucking when ridden. “I was able to find some back pain, but also found a tremendous amount of front foot pain. The horse’s front feet were hurting, so he
Dr. Bruce Connally is mainly an orthopedic acupuncturist, using it to treat pain and as a diagnostic aid by finding trigger points when trying to locate the cause of discomfort and dysfunction.
Although not recommended in areas over the heart or brain, electro-acupuncture is effective for many things such as treating mares with excessive fluid in the uterus after breeding, anhidrosis or the inability to sweat, head- shaking, back & neck pain, and navicular disease.
was using his back differently and this made his back sore. One problem led to another.”
Connally had the horse’s owner change the shoeing, did some cortisone injections into both front feet, and then he used acupuncture on the horse’s back. “This horse is a jumper, and he’s sound now and jumping again.” Acupuncture helped relieve the back problem that was caused by the foot problem.
The important thing is a proper diagnosis. “Acupuncturists who simply start with acu- puncture are sometimes just treating the signs rather than getting to the root of a problem. So, acupuncture for me comes second in terms of treatment. It comes first for diagnostics (often helping pinpoint a sore area), but second for treatment,” he says.
“Most of the acupuncture work I do is for sore backs. I have never found anything that could make a sore back respond any quicker than acupuncture. Sometimes I use dry nee- dles, and sometimes I use an electro-stimulator attached to the needles,” says Connally.
With the dry needles, he uses a traditional acupuncture needle. Some veterinarians use
a more modern version. “I like the traditional stainless steel needle with a copper hub or handle. This is basically a 30-gauge needle, which is a very small diameter. The ones we
use on horses are often 2.5 to 3 inches long, but half of that length is handle. One of the reasons I use these is that they conduct electricity very well. When you wrap a copper wire around a stainless steel wire, you can create an electrical
current like the alternator in your car. The the- ory is that we can create a micro-current at that spot to stimulate nerves. I like the traditional needles because of this point of view, which is
a Chinese way of thinking. I could probably do the same thing, and it would work the same, with plastic-handle needles,” he says. “When using the dry needle, I stick it in through the skin and work it down into different areas. Sometimes I go just through the skin, and at other times I may go into the tissues an inch deep or even more. I work that needle a bit, and if I am just doing dry needles, I work it up and down in the trigger point,” he explains.
These acupuncture points are all named.
A person taking an acupuncture course learns where all of these points are located on the body. “As a trigger point acupuncturist, sometimes
I don’t pay as much attention to the named points as I do to the various points that respond to my touch. If I find a painful point, there’s usually some sort of muscle knot or some other abnormal situation making this point very tight. Many of these points are tiny collections of nerves and blood vessels in one little spot.”
There are many of these all over the body. “If you put a dry acupuncture needle into one of these spots and move it up and down and wiggle it around - pecking at the tight spot - it’s amazing that the horse doesn’t think it hurts.
I can work it around and the tightness will
go away,” says Connally. This doesn’t seem to produce a pain response like you’d expect to see when jabbing a needle into the body.
Acupuncture Methods
There are several ways acupuncture can be performed. Nelson uses different types of needles, of different sizes. “There are tiny needles I use on cats, and sometimes on horses if they don’t like needles stuck into them. I also use some big needles that are 4 to 5 inches long on horses’ backs,” she says.
Electro-acupuncture involves attaching electrodes to inserted needles and run- ning a low voltage current through the needles to stimulate acupuncture points and the nerves and muscles underlying them. This technique is especially useful for specific nerve damage and is highly effective for pain relief and to help heal nerve damage, but electro-acupuncture is not recommended in areas over the heart or brain because of possible interference with electrical conductivity.
When Connally uses electrical stimula- tion, he puts the regular dry needles into the horse, attaches little alligator clips to the needles, and hooks them to a small electro- stimulator. “This is a battery-operated hand-held box that creates a pulsing type
of electricity rather than a steady current. This stimulates the nerve. There is a slightly different version used in human medicine where they put patches on the skin (hooked up to electrical stimulation), rather than sticking needles through the skin, to stimu- late nerves on the back for physical therapy,” says Connally.
Aqua-acupuncture entails using hypoder- mic needles and injecting a sterile fluid, usu- ally vitamin B12. This method can be used as a strengthening technique by injecting the fluid and then pulling the needles out.
It can also be used as a sedating or calming technique by leaving the needles in until the muscles “release” the needles.
Connally sometimes injects vitamin B12 into acupuncture points. “I may move the needle up and down a little to determine where it is, and then inject a few cc’s of B12. I choose that vitamin because it is not toxic, it is healthy for the horse, and it’s impossible to overdose (as any excess is passed out in urine). B12 is acid-based and stimulates the acupuncture point,” he says.
126 SPEEDHORSE, September 2015
equine health
Dr. Narda Robinson Colorado State University