Please remember!

The information presented on this blog represents "learning in progress" on my part, a horse owner, who was not satisfied with professional farriers and took matters in my own hands. As far as I am aware at the time of the post, the information presented is correct, but may change with me understanding more about hooves, in which case I will edit or remove the post. In order to follow my learning and understand everything about Molly's hoof, you need to start reading at the bottom.

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

Gene Ovnicek's model for medial-lateral imbalance

I watched this recent video on the Rick Lamb show:




Gene states that 70% of all lameness stem from medial-lateral imbalances. He goes on describing how this process is man-made and how it affects the horses posture. So here is his model:


From my experience with Molly I can confirm that she stood very often with pushing her FR outwards (to the side) and in her case, backwards. This must have gone on for a long time, while Molly was still growing. When I look at her X ray I see that her way of coping with that lateral side on the front right being left too high was by growing a longer medial side of P1. This would allow her to place the FR foot outwards without actually placing the whole leg outwards which must be tiring. Maybe this is how Molly came to have her crooked front right leg. She has stabilized that conformation by ossifying the lateral cartilages. Until this day Molly grows much more hoof wall on the lateral side than the medial, every trim cycle, I have to lower the lateral side.

My theory for why this lateral side grows so much more than the medial is because of Molly's orientation of the knee joints she is loading her foot over the lateral side. Thus, she receives more stimulation laterally which means more hoof growth. But since Molly lives in a non-abrasive environment, this extra hoof growth (which would be a good thing on abrasive surfaces) accumulates on her and causes an M-L imbalance. If the trimmer does not recognize it, it accumulates over time and the lateral wall gets pushed up high and the coronary band curves. I think that this pushing up of excess lateral wall was the main reason for Molly's ossifications, as the wall and cartillages are joint and the excess wall would pull on the cartillages.































According to Gene, the other way to spot a medial-lateral imbalance is when one heel (lateral) is run more forward then the other (medial). On Molly this is the case, the lateral heel runs more forward than the medial. To what degree this is normal or not I do not yet know.






















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