Tried magnesium to help calm my guy for trail rides and at dressage shows but all it seemed to do for him was cause horrendous diarrhea!
Well, you might say that show nerves can also cause diarrhea. But in his case there was semisolid show diarrhea before magnesium, versus running down the stall walls diarrhea while on Mag-Restore.
Diarrhea is a documented effect of too much magnesium.
For weight gain and condition, Iâve never used anything better than Fat Cat.
For joint supplements, I will follow the suggestions of the Purdue vets Iâve asked about it - itâs expensive urine, and does nothing.
I know. Milk of magnesia.
Got my fair share of it as a child 70 years ago. Just a look at the bottle and I can still taste the stuff. Flavored ground up white elementary school chalk.
I also think the decent level of biotin in OHS is beneficial when it comes to coat, skin, and hoof condition.
Itâs a good product, no doubt. Pricey, but good.
So hard to figure out!
Extra Vitamin E for horses that get little or no grass, have neurological history etc.
Spirulina for breathing- I took my asthmatic mare off this and she got worse, put her back on and she got better.
Cu/Zn if deficient.
ETA recently added 1 tablespoon salt twice a day, and sheâs sweating a little bit.
Interesting about the Garlic. So my horse is on Garlic in the summers, take him off in the winters. The barn says his fecal stinks so bad when he isnât on the garlic and has asked that I give him Garlic year round.
Knowing it helps with Ticks is an added bonus!
My horses consider honeycrisp apples and Mrs. Pastures horse cookies to be essential supplements.
Huh, thatâs interesting. What do you think the garlic is doing thatâs making his poop smell better?
Garlic can cause Heinz body anemia, especially in higher doses. For me, that small risk is worth the lower tick borne disease exposure, but everyone will have their own calculus on that risk vs reward. I do like to give my horses a break because of that (although âtick seasonâ is just starting earlier and earlier and going later and later, ugh.)
Depending on your definition of supplement, Ive been pretty happy with y easy keeper being on Vermont Blend Pro, Omega E (Flax + Vit E), Tract Guard, and electrolytes as my base.
This year we got a little more âsupplementâ heavy. I started him on One AC for anhydrosis for the summer which DID make a difference in his heat tolerance. I just recently started him on Equinitity amino acids and Karbo Combo+ because he had a teeny sarcoid start to get angry. Donât know how much those will help or not but why not try a $200 experiment 
That all goes with 2 kitchen measuring cups of soaked flax to make it palatable. When we run out of tract guard I may take him off that. I started it for FWS but donât know that it helped much with it being heat induced. The One AC made the biggest difference there.
I have been using Biotin Plus by Paragon for many years. It is a hoof and coat supplement. It has made a big difference in the health of my horses hooves,plus their coats look amazing. Like everything else itâs gotten expansive. I used to pay $110 for 20# with free shipping. Today its in the $160 range.
thatâs a lot of biotin, more than can be used in a day. Youâre maxed out at 20-30mg a day, depending on the horseâs size. The biotin is the only significant nutrient in there, everting else is inconsequential. Thatâs a REALLY expensive biotin product, especially if youâre feeding a whole scoop (50mg biotin) where half-ish of itâs just peed out.
Yes, it is expansive. Well thatâs disappointing to hear, although I have seen good results.There are so many products on the market all touting wonderful results. I look at reviews, but can they be trusted? Itâs sooo hard to know which ones work and which donât.
I ignore reviews. Itâs way too easy for a company to delete reviews that are less than gushing. Look at the ingredients and the amounts, and the science behind them. That doesnât mean that multiple ingredients can have a synergistic effect that the individual ingredients alone donât have. In this productâs case, thereâs 25mg methionine (and horses need multiple grams, and .5gm calcium (horses need 30-ish grams), so are insignificant.
Is there a hoof supplement you like?
that really depends on the rest of the diet, and what the actual issue is. So many hoof issues are trim-related, rather than diet.
From my reading of labels, a good VMS gives you more copper zinc and biotin than many âhoof formulasâ and thereâs a limit ( as noted above somewhere) on how much a horse needs and can use
There are ECIR VMS formulas (Madbarn has one) that have increased levels of these ingredients. They cost a bit more than the standard VMS but likely not as much as doing a standard VMS plus a hoof formula.
In all my label reading, here are my takeaways.
There are categories of supplements that all share the same vitamin and/or mineral ingredients with tweaks to packaging and marketing.
The hoof formulas all have some ratio of copper zinc and/or biotin.
The calming supplements all have magnesium in some form.
The flax based supplements all have flax along with something else to make it proprietary.
So make sure you have your bases covered with a general comprehensive VMS or ration balancer, and then most of this category of supplement becomes irrelevant.
Another category of supplements is things developed for human use that havenât really shown quantifiable effectiveness in real human research, which unfortunately includes all the feed through joint and arthritis supplements, as well as all the âlightâ modalities (not really supplements obviously). Thereâs generally very little equine specific research, but you can look up the general consensus on human efficacy on one of the big public facing health websites like Harvard or Hopkins medical schools.
Then there are herbs that claim to mimic pharmaceutical effects of pain killers or hormones. My guess is they are ineffective but I would be nervous to use them if they were effective because thatâs some powerful claim, and herbs are notoriously uneven in their effects from batch to batch. As anyone who dabbled in smoking backyard homegrown marijuana in the pre-hydroponic 1970s cab attest! Or even who has tried growing cooking herbs at home.
I do think that good probiotics can be useful to stabilize persistent diarrhea in humans and in horses, but thereâs no point continuing to feed them after the issue is resolved.
Uh, what? A ton of real, actual medicine comes from plants, and thereâs a boatload of real, actual study out there. I think what youâre saying is you doubt that the âall naturalâ plant based supplements are effective? But this statement as it standsâthat you âguessâ no herbs are effective is eye poppingly sweeping.
With regard specifically to horse supplements, thereâs real, actual research into stuff like Devilâs Claw (which is a popular âall naturalâ anti inflammatory and pain killer, a main ingredient in ButeLess among others) so itâs itâs kind of odd to just ignore that entire body of work. Not that there arenât indeed potential pitfalls, but there IS real, actual evidence to support itâs use.
Here are a couple to get you started but there is SO much study out there on medical uses of plants.
So yes. Obviously many pharmaceuticals come from plant extracts, or mimic their chemical structure.
My reservations about using the raw herb is that we donât know itâs strength. Any particular batch could be very weak or very strong. It could have differing levels of active ingredients. Also just because itâs the raw herb doesnât mean there are no potential toxicity or overdose levels. Devils Club seems to be basically safe but it does have some potential side effects.
Anyhow, if a herb is effective as it seems Devils Claw may be, I would be very cautious with it just as I would with a pharmaceutical. I wouldnât just toss it into the mix as a random âsupplementâ but treat it like a medication. I see from the link I shared that it may cause an increase in stomach acid, so it could contribute to ulcers. And people with compromised livers are recommended to be cautious. So it shares some of the same possible side effects as Bute.
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