My personal experience is that MSM/Vegetarian Glucosamine can make a big difference. I had an MRI on my right knee about 13 years ago that showed very little cartilage left. Without supplements it swells up and gets very painful, with MSM and Vegetarian Glucosamine daily my knee is mostly pain free. If I stop either one I notice the difference in about a week to 10 days.
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When thinking about supplements or medications try to weed through the anecdotal accounts - what we in the clinical drug research biz refer to facetiously as “a study with an n of 1.” Look for clinical trials run using scientific methods and a sufficient number of equine subjects to support rigorous statistical analysis.
I think your young trainer friend is equating inflammation to pain, when it’s really a whole huge process in the body that can effect pretty much every system. Inflammation is vital in the healing cascade, but uncontrolled or excess inflammation is harmful in a lot of different ways.
Frisbee at CSU did a study forever ago that showed a topical application of Surpass improved the cartilage matrix within the joint. If you can tip the catabolic/anabolic balance, healing can occur instead of destruction. Controlling the inflammation won’t rebuild cartilage that’s been lost, but it might help preserve what’s left.
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Agree, and this is where it gets reeeeeallllly hard with horses 
Not only are there generally not a lot of studies IN horses, but the number of subjects is typically pretty low. They just cost a lot LOL
And, while it can be easy to think “well there’s tons of valid research in people (or mice, or some other mammal), surely it works for horses”. Maybe, but maybe not, because the herbivore digestive system isn’t the same as an omnivore’s. Heck, we know from more recent omeprazole studies from Dr Ben Sykes, that horses don’t process omeprazole the same as people do, and worse, it’s a bit unpredictable from horse to horse! And we know that horses get 1/4 the dose of firocoxib that the typical dog gets, despite the vast difference in weight.
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I’m a big fan of Adequan. All of mine get two loading doses per year - so the cost is not actually that much more than a feed through.
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Mad Barn is advertising pure MSM at a cost that works out to 23 cents a day or about $7.50 a month or about $90 a year. A month long loading dose of Adequan 7 or 8 vials every 4 days is aboit $600 to $800 according to young trainer, which is about $2 a day or $60 a month. This is Canadian prices.
I agree, most feed through supplements are in the $2 a day range.
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$345 for a box of 7 in the US.
https://www.valleyvet.com/ct_detail.html?pgguid=D04648EB-376C-43E8-8D06-5D4FBD41D64D
$430 in Canada?
https://www.petsdrugmart.ca/en/Product/Adequan-Equine-Injection-127466/6111
Ok that’s good to know. Young trainer was absolutely accurate on her cost estimate of Gastrogard from our vet (about $1100 for a month) so I tend to believe her on costs. Perhaps that’s the cost from our vet? I haven’t gone shopping yet as it’s a bit more invasive and big deal than I am ready for.
Whole thing started because my barn friend mentioned she was thinking about feed through joint support, I said nothing really worked, she said “no there’s lots” and I said I’d be interested to see the research. She sent me MadBarns literature review and I saw that MSM actually had some decent research (it was the only one really) and was cheap so I got interested.
I’m not really ready for Adequan IM and would want to have my vet in the loop if I started that even if that’s not the cheapest source.
Some feed through joint supplements do work for some horses. Years ago (21?) I asked my them vet about oral supplements for the horse with a fixed bone chip in a hock. The vet told me to pick one, double dose it for two weeks, and if I didn’t see a difference to pick something else.
This advice has served me well over the years. I have seen a difference several times. When I gave that hock bone chip horse ChondroMax (8500mg chondroitin, 8000mg each MSM and glucosamine) I noticed a difference on the fourth day, didn’t entirely believe it, and the horse got better and better over the next couple of weeks.
All the studies say horses can’t benefit from chondroitin, but that horse plainly did. My theory for years was that the horses in the chondroitin study didn’t have cartilage issues and just dumped out the chondroitin. I later found out the doses used were 20% of what ChondroMax had, and even the “high” dose test amount wasn’t much more than 25%.
The other most obvious time was when my then 13 year old horse felt ready to trot after a 5-6 minute walk warm up, instead of the usual 10-12 minutes. I had a series of walk exercises I went through before trotting, and it confused me when the horse was loose and ready to trot before I’d finished the series. It took 2-3 days before I realized I’d started giving him 10,000mg/day of Pureform Glucosamine the week before. He’d been on 10,000mg/day of MSM for years at that point, and the glucosamine was an “I wonder if he would benefit from glucosamine noe that he’s technically considered a senior horse” trial.
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Years ago I looked into all the joint supplements on the market and the research done on them. IIRC, MSM was found to have some amount of pain and inflammation relief but only at doses way higher than what most supplements have them at. The dosage needed to be more like 20-25000 mg a day, and most supplements have somewhere more around 8000mg.
It’s still pretty cheap to feed, even at the 20000 mg a day
Yup. I get it directly from my vet since it’s easier. ~$380/7 individual vials or ~$480 for the 10 shot vial. 14 shots/horse/year is roughly $675, or $1.85/day.
It sounds like she may have been giving you the annual price for 2x a year. Most of us that use it are pretty locked in on the price since it figures so heavily in our lives. 
After years of playing around with adequan, I found that my current equine does shockingly well on a weekly dose for 7 weeks, as well as the 4 day regimen except I’m feeling the extra umph factor for 7 weeks instead off 28 days, followed by the same “residual effect” for the balance of the 6+ months, however every animal is different! This approach makes my life easier since it can be given every Tuesday (and I have a greater likelihood of remembering, something not always true with the every four-day approach) and does not interfere with being on FEI showgrounds (it’s legal pre show, just not during the show, or needs veterinary supervision, etc. - All things that are pain in the ass to deal with). But as many years as I’ve been giving MSM and using adequan, legend etc., while I’ve found MSM useful, it in no way replaces adequan or even approaches the value that the prescription only joint health medications provide.
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I just purchased the 7 vials of Adequan for $228. from my vet’s pharmacy with a 30% off coupon and will also get a $20 rebate.
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Isn’t MSM the supplement that some horses react to and go a little crazy on? Or am I thinking of something else?
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Many years ago I read an article perhaps in Blood Horse, that suggested MSM helped prevent joint issues in foals, and I started feeding it then. I haven’t had any joint issues, and although I can’t say that it is because of MSM, I have continued using it.
For years, I have fed it to all my horses, foals, working horses, and retirees with the thought that it ‘can’t hurt’ and it doesn’t cost much.
Reading the Mad Barn article a while back confirmed that, to me.
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I recall one post on here about that topic, and it may be true (it’s horses, anything’s possible), but even the anecdotes are rare (to my memory)…
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Nope - that’s the price for one round in Canada if you purchase through your vet, at least last time I checked a couple years ago. It’s very expensive up here. I’d be using it if it were only $300!
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Some horses do have a reaction to dietary sulfur-based ingredients like that. They’re the exception. Some horses have wild reactions to some forms of magnesium, also a pretty uncommon exception.
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It could potentially help with the inflammation from certain “growing pains” issues. It’s not going to hurt, might help. But I wouldn’t just go with that without also really dialing in the nutritional component of the diet 
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My horse seems prone to inflammatory reactions. In addition to the inflammation found when he injured his DDFT, he also tends to react to vaccines! So now I use a regimen that is possibly “belt and suspenders”
Specifically for joints, he gets Equithrive Complete which has glucosamine and chondroitin (for the joints) as well as MSM and Resveratrol (for inflammation) Not hugely expensive, may help. He also gets a round of Adequan twice a year.
I am doing what I can to forestall problems and since he has been sound since his initial recovery four years ago, I am not inclined to change without good reason.
