Equine Chiropractor: ‘Out of Place’?

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 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

one side of its pelvis, unsurprisingly leading to the other side overcompensating. In turn, there will be greater pressure put on the lumbar spine (low back), which will cause the junction between the upper and lower back, (just behind the saddle) to move too much, resulting in… reduced performance, and pain! When in motion, this will then cause the horse to put more weight through the front limbs, causing muscle imbalances in the shoulder and neck, and in more severe cases, tendon issues and lameness. So, what started as a simple stiffness, has a very real potential of manifesting into something far more problematic.

When areas of the spine compensate and move more than they should, the nerves in the area become hypersensitised, causing pain. The nervous system and brain interpret these signals as ‘there’s damage’, so they start to adapt in response, causing the muscles around a joint to tighten up as a protective mechanism. Now, these muscles cannot be massaged loose, they’re so deep and small, no one can reach them and rub them loose, either on a horse or human. What they respond to, is movement, which as a veterinary chiropractor, I can help with. A good physiotherapist or osteopath may go about it in a slightly different way, but they can achieve the same results!

Through hands on and complimentary treatments, such as veterinary lasers (which I’ll discuss next time), we can induce and encourage the restoration of movement to normal, or as close to normal, as possible. That’s what, if you ever see me at work, I am trying to achieve.

Put simply, movement activates the big large nerve fibres and these help to overload and switch off the small, irritating pain fibres that cause those aches and stiffness by contracting the segmental muscles around the spine that we discussed earlier. This is why after any form of treatment, it is great for horses to the able to spend a while on pasture, with their heads down eating.

After treatment, the body will be able to move more freely, allowing things to be ‘normal’, or miraculously ‘be back in alignment or in place’ (see why it’s not the best way of putting it?).

The mammalian body is beautiful, and complex. Knowledge is continually developing through research and studies. What we knew last week has probably already changed, so my eight years in the field feels small to me, and though I have no intention of baffling you with jargon and research articles, I feel it is my responsibility as a professional, as an animal enthusiast, to help fellow owners and keepers understand the why, so that they are armed with supported knowledge to make informed decisions about the care of their horses.

Web: www.mkchiro.co.uk @theequinechiro @theequinechiro