Looking for advice/Ongoing lameness - feeling gas-lit

[CecilyB]

Thank you for all the replies.

[Ghazzu]

@CecilyB

Looking for stories from owners seeing obvious and ongoing lameness issues with their horses, and when sending them for 2nd opinion vetting, the horse is ‘miraculously’ sound. Has this ever happened to you? What did you do?

It is unclear to me just what you mean here–
is the horse observably lame to you?
Does your primary DVM see the lameness, even if they may not be able to diagnose the etiology?
Does the 2nd opinion DVM not agree that the horse is lame?

[sascha]

@Demerara_Stables

OP has already asked for a second opinion, so maybe there’s something else going on

I can think of several vets in my area (not a huge hotbed for vets) who are on a number of people’s lists of do not use unless emergency. So, ime, a 2nd opinion doesn’t always yield a better/more astute answer. In many cases, sure! But if you’re new/inexperienced it doesn’t guarantee anything except a 2nd set of eyes.

To illustrate, I’ll give an example from many years ago. I complained to clients that I thought there was something more going on with their horse than lack of training (she was green) because her episodes of FU didn’t seem to correspond to much and weren’t a ‘get off my back’ sort of deal.

They had their vet check her out. “She’s just pissed.” was the entire diagnosis. Um, no, turns out she needed tie-back surgery and was full-on panicking when asked to come a little rounder in her neck I can think of at least one other vet from back then that we probably would have got a similarly terrible ‘diagnosis’ from if I hadn’t insisted that clients ship the horse into the stable I was based at so they could use ‘my’ vet.

Another sort of weirdness was when I had a dynamic scope done on my horse. My horse was making a hell of a racket as I worked her in the echo-ey indoor of the vet school. Her team was gathered round the monitor looking for any sign of weirdness while she was practically drowning out all conversation. Another vet came in, looked at the monitor and pronounced, “Well that’s pretty perfect! Why is this horse getting a dynamic scope.” “CAN YOU NOT HEAR HER?” was met with, “Oh.”

So although I am all for respecting vets (I love love love my vets), they are not all perfect. And, while I know that some folks are actively looking for ‘excuses’ for their horses, I’m not going to lump anyone into that category just because they’ve had their horse looked at by 2 vets.