Knowledge Matt Kenna is a fully qualified veterinary and sports chiropractor working with elite athletes and their horses. He is currently working providing consultancy to premiership football teams, high goal players and treats horses across all levels of polo from low goal to high goal. Based between Guards and Cowdray, he travels all over the south of England. This is the first in a series of articles by Matt on equine chiropractic topics
‘Out of Place’?
An out of touch phrase
Photography courtesy of Matt Kenna
Modern social movements are ever increasing, and for good reason – to correct falsehoods that have stood for far too long, some of which beg the question, how on earth did the norm become normal in the first place? Let’s step into my industry for a moment. “Please can you treat my [animal], their back/ pelvis/neck is out of place or alignment”, is a request I get almost daily. ‘Out of place’. It may seem like an harmless phrase but its insinuation amongst the general population 60
Polo Times, April 2021
can have quite significant negative impacts, which can undermine the great work of good manual therapists. Mythbuster: horses have remarkably strong soft tissue structures that keep them well and truly ‘in place’. Out of place, in a medical or veterinary sense, suggests a dislocation of some degree! On the flip side, if your gut is telling you there has been some sort of injury, biomechanical or structural change for which a manual therapist is better suited to address, then we are here to help
(with your vet’s consent). But let’s have a think about adjusting the language around the issue. I can only imagine ‘out of place’ was born out of an oversimplification many, many years ago, where ‘has reduced function’, i.e. not working properly, would be more appropriate, and used when our understanding of the equine musculoskeletal system was far inferior to what it is today. When I’m asked to just push things back in to place, I simply can’t, because nothing was ever ‘out of place’ in the initial instance. Sadly, the mammalian body is far more complex than that. The issues that present themselves in our horses are rarely down to a single problem, unless through trauma, they often manifest over time. Think of a washing up bowl with a dripping tap, eventually it’ll overflow and we notice it. The same goes for the equine body, much like our own. Long periods of reduced movement (boxed horses) or repetitive motion, excessive exercise and starting exercise again after a long rest, cause micro traumas in muscles and to joints, causing subclinical issues, those which we never tend to recognise until it’s too late. These might first present as stiffening up and restricted movement which, if left unaddressed, lead to longer term problems and performance issues. This is why I generally recommend, much like the HPA handbook, to get your horses checked at the beginning of the season as a minimum. The spine itself is a whole motor unit, meaning all the individual segments work together to produce global, overall movement. For motion to occur in any direction, it takes a symbiotic relationship between all sections of the spine. If there are vertebral joints that stiffen up, you might expect to notice it straight away, but that is unfortunately rarely the case, as the body adapts. Other areas step up to the plate and take the job of the restricted regions, causing compensatory movement patterns to occur, often so subtle, they go unnoticed to the untrained eye, all while secondary issues may be developing. In polo it is really common, due to the nature of the sport, for a horse to get stiff on www.polotimes.co.uk
