No Hoof No Horse – Laminitis Recovery, Severe Osteomyelitis Case

Today, we're here with Leroy and Beth. Poor Leroy has had a very nasty case of laminitis, where he also developed osteomyelitis. He's been dealing with this for a little while now, but I’ll pass it over to Beth to tell us more about his history, as he's been a really successful case for us.

Video Transcript

Good morning, and welcome to another episode of "No Hoof, No Horse." Today, we're here with Leroy and Beth. Poor Leroy has had a very nasty case of laminitis, where he also developed osteomyelitis. He's been dealing with this for a little while now, but I’ll pass it over to Beth to tell us more about his history, as he's been a really successful case for us.

Beth, tell us a bit about Leroy.

Beth: Leroy is a 15-year-old off-the-track horse. In the wet weather earlier this year, he had three abscesses blow out through his coronet band in about three months. All of them were treated by the vet, but as you know, he wasn’t gaining weight, and he was not doing well at all. That’s when I reached out to you.

Andrew: Thanks, Beth. We were a bit shocked when we first saw Leroy’s foot. We took some radiographs, and he had both sinking and rotation. He had only about 6 mm of space between what appeared radiographically to be the sole and the pedal bone. On top of that, he had a 5 cm diameter "shark bite" lesion in his P3 (pedal bone), which indicated a terrible infection in the bone. Seven weeks ago, we decided to debride the entire front of the hoof wall, cleaning out all the infection.

When we got down to the bone and exposed the pedal bone, we cleaned out all the infected material, but we realized we were left with very little hoof. Leroy’s future was truly hanging by a thread. We put a special shoe on him, provided support under the back of the hoof, and placed him on a strict diet. Beth has been diligently changing his bandages every two to three days.

And now, we have a sound horse. Massive thanks to Beth for her efforts as an owner. I’m going to hand it over to Steve Coston, who did the incredible shoeing work. He’s our head master farrier at the clinic. Steve, take it from here.

Steve: Hi, I’m Steve. When I first met Beth, Andrew told me we were going to look at an interesting case. I had no idea just how interesting it would be. When we x-rayed the hoof, I looked at Andrew, and he looked at me, and we both thought, “Oh, this isn’t good.” Beth was in tears.

Beth even asked if we thought we needed to put Leroy down. I told her, “We’re in the business of saving horses, not putting them down.” When we took a closer look at the foot, I asked Andrew, “What’s this?” and he said, “That’s bone.” I thought, “Well, that can’t be good.”

We went to work. Andrew has a real knack for dealing with these kinds of problems. We took off all the excess hoof, and there was a hole where the infection had eaten away the hoof—it was massive. You could see the bone through the front of the hoof, and it was all infected and oozing pus. We cleaned it up as best as we could with what we had.

Amazingly, seven weeks later—seven weeks to the day, actually—every time Andrew calls me about this horse, we take a look, and we can’t believe how well it’s coming along.

Andrew: One of the secrets to treating these complex cases is being able to grow down new hoof as quickly and efficiently as possible. Without rapid hoof wall growth, there’s no way to get the pedal bone off the ground. We radiographed Leroy six weeks after the hoof resection, and he had 15 mm of new sole growth underneath the exposed pedal bone. For a case like this, that kind of growth is rare. You can see the radiographs and photos of the surgery on our website under "Total Gold Clinical Cases."

The top part of the hoof, where the abscess was draining, is now covered with new growth. We measured it last week, and Leroy has grown 30 mm from the coronary band in just seven weeks. That amount of growth acts like an insurance policy, allowing the entire hoof capsule to grow, lifting the sole off the ground and alleviating pain. This essentially saved Leroy’s life.

Beth: Since we started using Total Gold, we’ve never seen hoof growth like this. It’s basically saved Leroy’s life. There’s a lot of effort going on behind the scenes, but without the hoof growth, we wouldn’t have seen these results.