Category Archives: Health

I will be the first to admit that I am really glad that I am practicing on horses in modern times, as opposed to just about any other times. For...

The horse’s foot is so important that they’ve even come up with a cliché about it. You know, “No foot, no horse.” Yada yada yada. But, as another cliché goes,...

I have had the opportunity to conduct a lot of presale/prepurchase exams. You know, the exam that you’re almost obliged to schedule prior to making one of the most important...

Summer has arrived, and with it comes hot, humid temperatures. Toasty summer days aren’t merely a discomfort for horses, they can be downright dangerous. Heat stress, or the more serious...

I think that it was somewhere in the late 1980s that I first heard that horses got stomach ulcers. It was interesting—curious, actually—to find out that horses had ulcer problems...

"Respiratory health is essential to performance," stresses Dr. Emmanuelle Van Erck Westergren of Equine Sports Medicine Practice in Waterloo, Belgium. The prominent veterinarian and thought leader spent 15 years engaged...

It’s summer, aka the sweatiest time of the year. Hooray! And while sure, there are things to enjoy (like swimming, ice cubes, and air conditioning), outdoor activities such as barn...

There’s something really sweet that you might want to consider putting on your horse’s wound. Literally:  sweet. You may have some in your kitchen—honey. Honey is being investigated for its...

Electrolytes. Not just a running joke in the movie Idiocracy, electrolytes are an incredibly important part of maintaining vital functions in your body. Certified athletic trainers and pro athletes swear...

Dogma has always been a curious phenomenon to me. In the horse world, people often get dogmatic, from the “best” way to feed a horse, to the “proper” way to...

Most of us have probably come to accept that flies are a fact of life on the farm. Sure, there are ways to combat them for a while, but it...

What with all of the products out there to help “support” your horse’s gastrointestinal system, I thought it might be fun to share some thoughts and research with my friend...

Here’s something about which I get calls all the time. Say you come out to the barn and you find that your horse has a bit of swollen leg. You...

For the past several years, the High Performance Equine Sports Medicine Group, led by veterinarians Dr. Mark Revenaugh and Dr. Timothy Ober, has been searching for methods to improve the...

COVID-19 has impacted all facets of our lives, including the economy, with an estimated 10 million unemployment claims filed in March. Among them are horse owners, many of which now...

One writes a blog at the risk of sounding preachy. In my blog, I try to share my opinions, my experience, as well as links to scientific research. I realize...

In my experience, horse owners worry about a lot of things, and especially disease caused by bacteria and viruses—but I don’t think that most horse owners really understand much about...

I often wonder about the word “need” as it applies to working on horse teeth. Need means: “To require something because it is essential, or very important.” So, it seems...

At the time of writing there have been 1,029 scientific papers published on COVID-19—two papers in 2019 and 1,027 in 2020! This illustrates how acute the emergence of this pandemic...

When horses get older, people often talk about retiring them.  And until asked, I never really thought that much about it. I mean, I’ve seen plenty of horses that have...