If you suspect your horse has laminitis, get advice from someone who will know.

If your horse has laminitis contact your vet.

If your horse is showing clinical signs that could possibly be laminitis, treat it as such.

Treatment for laminitis is very unlikely to be wrong for other conditions. Treatment for other conditions may well be wrong for laminitis.

The aim of treatment is to remove the "cause" and to reduce further separation of the laminae.

What can you do before the vet arrives?

Apply frog supports to the affected feet. (see Frog Supports).

This could be done prior to the arrival of the vet, provided you can pick up the legs with ease.

In order to take a horse off grass, only move it from the field to a stable if it is a short distance, preferably with frog supports, and provided it walks relatively easily.

If a horse is reluctant to walk - do not force it to do so.

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THE PROBLEMS WITH TREATMENT

It is so important to realise what a potentially dangerous condition laminitis is.

The changes that occur in laminitis start before clinical signs of lameness are seen.

For this reason it is imperative that suitable treatment and management is started as soon as possible.

Suitable Treatment - Confused?

If there were a treatment that worked every time then all vets would be using it.

Advice given by one person may be completely opposite to that given by another.

We often do not know when we treat a horse with laminitis how it will respond to treatment.

All vets will tell you that for the same treatment regime, some will improve dramatically, some will take longer to come right and there will be some cases whose pedal bone just continues to sink.

Many mild cases of laminitis will settle down almost regardless what we do.

Some very severe cases of laminitis will have so much separation that it will be impossible to save them.

It is the group in the middle whose treatment is important as to whether they recover, partly recover or not.

Chronic Laminitics are like alcoholics - they never "recover" fully.