Did you know that lameness usually arises from neck, back or pelvis problems?
Check out what a blocked sacrum can cause in your horse!
These photos are of a young horse with a blocked sacrum. The sacrum is the portion of the spine that connects to the pelvis and the left and right sacroiliac joints form the pelvis.
A blockage means that the sacrum no longer moves properly because the Fascies are tightened in that area. It is not possible to identify this with radiographs or ultrasound. You need to use thermography or feeling. But you have to be well trained for that. The sacrum namely moves only a few millimeters, but those few millimeters are extremely important!
If the sacrum does not move properly, then here are the consequences:
On the first picture (from left), we see that this young horse is standing cow-hocked. The hock forms a too large angle to the outside and the heels are turned towards each other. Thus the leg-hoof balance is not correct and the hoof wears out in a wrong way. The angle between the pastern and the hoof is not correct either. This gives an additional load on the pastern joint, but also on the hock and the knee.
On the second picture we see that the pressure on the outside of the hoof is too large, therefore a bruise occurred. That is the red spot in the hoof wall. The inside of the hoof is too low on this horse.
On the third picture we see what happened after treatment. The horse was treated in a workshop trigger point release, which also released Fascies, and after that treated by a fellow vet. A blockade of the sacrum rarely stands alone. Usually we find blockages in the cto region (transition between the cervical (neck) and breast (thoracic) vertebrae) and in the transition from the thoracic vertebrae to the lumbar vertebrae.
The sacrum of this horse received further treatment and as you can see in picture 3, the angle between hock and cannon returned to normal. The horse is not cow-hocked anymore. What we can see is that the angle of the pastern and the hoof is now the one that is not correct anymore. We can not leave the horse like this, he will get injured!
On picture 4 we can see the end result as well as the corrected hoof balance. The leg now has correct angles and, while in movement, the horse now lands straight on the hoof and the joints move in one line forward (i.e. they are aligned). A horse compensates errors in the leg and hoof balance by, among other things, twisting his joints. This puts more load on those joints and eventually overload.
What is the significance of this story??? Do not wait until your horse is lame!!!
By the time your horse shows lameness, he has compensated for neck, back and pelvic pain in several places and overloaded several joints for a long time! Rehabilitation is often possible, but you should look at the whole body and not just the lame leg. Rehabilitation can also take quite some time!
4DimensionDressage international
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