A day in the life of a horse physio
As a veterinary physiotherapist everything that I do in centred around the following goals: reducing pain, restoring function, and improving performance. And this focus allows me to work with horses and owners to achieve their short- and long- term goals.
A general workday for me will start at 9am (on days that I am not lecturing). However, some clients have horses up to 2 hours away, so my day in reality starts much earlier.
If the client’s horse is new to me, I begin by noting down their contact details, case history and the history of any presenting complaints. I also like to take a triage approach to veterinary physiotherapy: what are the things I can do to help this horse? What can I not do anything about but can do to help/support this horse with (some conformational traits for example)? And lastly what can somebody else do about the issue? For this reason, I also ask for details relating to the horse’s vet, saddler, farrier, dentist and instructor.
Once all of this has been noted, I start the assessment. To begin with I will perform a static assessment. This considers the horses conformation, joint angles, muscle atrophy/hypertrophy, and obvious muscle imbalances.
Following a static assessment, I will move on to relate how the horse’s conformation affects its movement in a dynamic assessment; this includes gait analysis.
Straight/circles
Hard/soft ground
In-hand/ridden/lungeing (rider and tack influences)
Walk/trot/canter/transitions
Neurological tests (where appropriate)
Finally, once this has been assessed I can get my hands on the horse and perform tissue palpation. With palpation I am looking for:
Muscle symmetry and balance
Bony landmark symmetry
Soft tissue quality
Effusion
Heat
Fibrosis
Muscle tone and condition
And I will then test the Range of motion (ROM) of all of your horse’s joints.
After the assessment has taken place, a treatment plan can be formed. Long- and short- term goals will be set that are achievable, objective and measurable so that I can be accountable for any progress made. The range of therapies that I chose will depend on the tissue pathologies and the different stages of repair (acute, sub-acute, chronic).
There are likely to be elements of active and passive rehabilitation modalities in the plan. Passive treatment includes how I, as a vet physio, can influence the healing of the tissue whilst I am present and the affects thereafter; from massage, stretching, electrotherapies etc.
Active treatment is usually given as ‘homework’ to the owner, remedial exercises, lungeing, schooling and lateral work, and cardiovascular fitness all fall under this category. I may enhance active rehabilitation, where needed, by prescribing the use of training aids and/or kinesiotaping.
The role of the veterinary physiotherapist in active rehabilitation is just as important as the passive work that we do. This is down to having spent years studying the anatomy and biomechanics of animals so that we know how best to support them. Any active rehabilitation needs to be careful not to aggravate any underlying conditions and the timings of all activities need to be carefully planned and monitored. The physiotherapist will consider the animal as a whole and prescribe exercises that are individually tailored to the stage of healing/targeted area and they will continually monitor and observe the animal’s response to treatment and put adaptations to the plan in place when they are needed.
