I'm Chris Ray, I'm an equine surgeon. I'm the ranch veterinarian for Copper Spring Ranch in Bozeman, Montana, and we raise barrel horses - primarily barrel horses - we raised a few racehorses, too.
OSPHOS (clodronate) has had a tremendous effect on our practice in this sense - is that we are now able to treat a problem that for years we knew that we had it but had had really no therapy for. So we when we come around bone edema bone, marrow lesions, whatever, when we identify those on MRI or if we're suspicious through other diagnostics that we may have those then we're able to formally address that kind of problem.
The kind of lesions that we're talking about would be – specifically from the label – would be for those heel-sore horses that have, "navicular disease," "navicular syndrome." But we have many other problems that... or we come across many other things that is applicable, and that would be sore back, sore necks, proximal suspensory lesions. All those I believe respond – or I've had cases that respond – to therapy for those specific conditions.
So when we if I have a horse that comes back from an MRI and they have obvious bone remodeling bone change, a bone edema, in their navicular bone then I feel comfortable to recommend and to use OSPHOS because I feel like that it truly targets that problem and we should have good success.
So the improvement if we talk about it if we talk about heel pain, certainly we're looking for an increase or an improvement in their lameness grades. And for me it's not unusual for those to improve at least to lameness grades. I mean, I kind of expect that.
OSPHOS has really increased, I think, our success rate in heel-sore, those horses that we block to the heels because typically we have multiple problems. But now we have a medication that targets bone edema, which we didn't have in the past.