Hello Everyone!

I should be working in my garden weeding but felt the need to start this topic. Luxury & perk of living in Florida, vegetable garden & good fishing year round! I have a huge vegetable garden with all forms of lettuce, mustard & collard greens, onions, cauliflower, broccoli, pole & bush beans, snap peas, cabbage, turnips, radishes, beets & tomatoes. Mindless work and great enjoyment to eat what you grow!

Attached to this blog somehow will be a couple of videos. Not my job, so I hope that they are there; I just do the writing. You can also listen to my podcast on sciatica in sport horses at this link: Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Please realize that it will be shocking to watch a horse with these clinical signs but the truth is, this is happening to literally hundreds of thousands of horses daily! I have treated approximately 50 horses as severe as this horse in my career. All clinical signs in those 50-odd horses were resolved with proper treatment & rehabilitation. I have to state this again with the most important words bolded. All clinical signs in those horses resolved WITH PROPER TREATMENT & REHABILITATION! Those bolded words will be explained and discussed in other blog posts more clearly. I will also share more information & the history of this horse along with other videos, especially prior to this episode & post-treatment. It is my goal to educate you, so please be patient, as it takes extreme patience for healing of any injury, especially sciatica in any species.

It is a proven fact that 40% of the world’s human population (2024) of 8.142 billion people have sciatica. So that means that 3,256,800,000, which is 3 billion, 256 million, 800 thousand people right now, are experiencing sciatica clinical signs. I would estimate that the same percentage of 40% is true in horses, though in my patient population I would calculate a good guess of 60-65% of NEW cases I see. At least 3 out of 5 NEW cases I see have sciatica clinical signs.

The worst part about this topic, sciatica, is that no one in the veterinary or sport horse world is talking about it. There are no peer-reviewed published papers on sciatica in horses, like none. Absolute goose egg ZERO! How can that be when there are literally thousands of humans, dogs, cows, camels, elephants, cats, and other species and not a single published paper for horses? There is even a cat-cow or cat-camel sciatica stretch for humans to help relieve the clinical signs.

So what this means is that it does not exist in horses even though it does! I was just recently at AAEP, a huge yearly equine veterinary conference, this year in Denver, Colorado. I showed the same videos to numerous equine veterinarians. Only one veterinarian, Sue Dyson (the most published veterinarian of books & peer-reviewed articles), knew that not only was the horse extremely uncomfortable and painful but also asked if these were sciatica clinical signs. I said yes. Approximately 1 out of 20-ish veterinarians that I showed these same videos to are pretty horrible statistics. This is absolutely not a criticism of the veterinary profession, but how do you know something exists if it is not in the educational curriculum, published in any peer-reviewed papers, or even talked about within the profession?

I have always personally believed and stated that people are doing the best they can with what they have or know whether it is one’s education, relationships, training a horse or dog…whatever it is. The only question I have is if 40% of the human population has this condition, how is it possible that horses do not? They have two sciatic nerves, as we do, and all the other mammals on this planet! Just go to any hunter-jumper show and go to the warm-up areas. You will see a lot of horses exhibiting clinical signs of sciatica no matter what height of jump by kicking out before or after jumping a jump. It is so common and so sad to know that so many horses are in pain with this neuropathy (nerve injury).

What are some of the most common clinical signs? Horses that have poor sloping hind quarter musculature, kick out on the lunge line for no reason or are kicking out at your leg, scooting or squirting off especially at the canter, do not like to wear blankets especially with leg straps, difficulty getting up after laying down, kicks the walls constantly, press their butts against the stall wall, kicks in the trailer during transportation, and tail swishing even when there are no bugs around. If your horse is exhibiting some of these clinical signs, it probably has sciatica!

When I lived in Minnesota, winter is the perfect time to look for the clinical signs because there are absolutely no living flying bugs around. Ok, that is not true, because some of my western barns that are heated to the temperature of Florida, would have a few mutated flies that would survive & reproduce during the winter. Anyways, it is the best time to walk down the barn aisle and watch horses in their stalls or even watch them outside on turnout. You’ll see horses standing, if in their stall with their hind ends pressed against the wall, or as they are shifting their weight from one hind limb to another they will swish their tail slightly or a lot, then it will settle down. Horses that kick or tick the walls of their stall, self explanatory, sciatica. Grooming, they are fussy about touching their hind end with even the softest brush or extremely sensitive when asked to pick up their hind limbs. Farriers have a hard time bringing their hind limb forward to clench the nails before the final trim rasping even if unshod behind.

There is much more to come but all the time that I have for right now. Please share this blog and my podcast with your horse friends and remember to always put The Horse First.

AJD