Part 2: More Pulse Fun

I should begin by stating that the pulse system that's been used on Penn is a one of a kind system (I don’t want to share the actual company name on here because you know, privacy reasons for my fellow barn people). It is based on that company’s human pulse machine and has been modified to use on horses. It's currently being marketed to vets and equine chiropractors, but eventually might come to certified non-vet users. I have zero details about that besides they’re looking into legal reasons you’d have to be a vet to use it (but I am extremely interested). The system pictured in Part 1 is the certified user only version- the pulse head puts a lot of force out over a small area, which means you should have training to use it. Rest assured, it is not enough to actually hurt your horse! However, you would not want to use it on yourself.

Luckily, there is a lower intensity version in the works that will eventually be available for sale to regular people! My barn is basically beta testing it for its creators (I dropped the thing on day 1, excellent data there *facepalm*). We jokingly call it "The Phaser" because its actual name is “Mini-Phaser”, and of course there are many Star Trek jokes, “Set phasers to massage!” It is a hand held unit that uses pulses/massage vibes mixed with cold laser technology to treat muscle soreness. They also have a custom liniment (that they’ve specifically made to be USEF legal) that you can use to aid the phaser treatment (water works just fine too, but I’ve found it’s not slippery enough).

He's not drugged, I promise. He's just extremely relaxed post-massage session with the mini-phaser last Saturday.

I’ve been messing with the phaser for about a week now. I love it because Penn loves it. It sometimes takes horses a few minutes to adjust to the feeling, but horses usually take to it nicely. Penn took to it immediately when I first treated him last Thursday (8/17). To do a treatment:

•  Find a location where the horse flinches away (I use the handle of my spray bottle and run it all over him). I’m looking for a book of pressure points to help identify exactly where to massage for maximum effect when I find a flinch point.

This book has an excellent diagram of pressure points and what parts of the horse they effect.

• Spray the area (no bigger than your hand) with the custom liniment. I found dry hair pulls a bit on the phaser head since it is silicon and water just isn’t slick enough to make it comfortable in my hand.
• Turn the mini-phaser on and gently rub it back and forth across the area for 5 minutes to start, but it can be longer as the horse adjusts to the mini-phaser. It should not feel like an upper body workout for you! I find myself wandering to a bigger area, which means he's sometimes still flinchy when I'm done with an area and then I have to do that spot again.

And that’s it. Treat as many areas as you want for as long as you want (starting with 5 minutes and working your way up in time). Ride immediately following or not, whatever you’d like.

There’s a phone app that goes with it since the mini-phaser has different pulse levels, except that’s still in beta test mode too and you need an Apple product to get the testing app… and I have a Droid. (I’m currently in the market for a used, working iPhone 6 or better- it needs to be capable of/have iOS 9 and have Bluetooth. If you have one you’d like to sell, hit me up please!).

Penn fell asleep in the cross ties on night one (a week ago Thursday), and I probably massaged him for an hour in various places on his back and hindquarters. His flinching was gone after treating, which was awesome! When the muscles are tight (aka the horse is putting weight evenly on all 4 feet), you can touch other parts of the horse, same side or not, and feel the pulses. In one place on Penn’s hindquarters you can feel the pulses in the stifle. Just super cool, and Penn loved it.

I rode two days later (last Saturday) and he was quite nice- relaxed and responsive. I ran through a mix of 1-3 and 2-3 movements with flying changes in my own test pattern, and he was game and relaxed for all of it. I’m testing this to use at shows, so I opted to treat him again after I rode, and then again Sunday morning directly before I rode (mock horse show environment).

Sleepy relaxed horse.

OMG guys, my Sunday horse was so supple and relaxed, but not overly so. He gave me 20 minutes of really super work: Floaty forward uphill trot, relaxed and bouncy canter. I rode the canter work from 2-3 (walk-medium canter, 3 loop serpentine, short diagonal simple change, repeat), except I replaced the simple changes with flying changes. All of the work was so relaxed and supple. The two flying changes were extremely relaxed and on the bit, and I’m pretty sure one was clean and the other might have been a hair late behind. He got praise and then we went to road walk and baby-sit a baby horse.

I rode again Monday, sans massage, and it was atrocious. First he couldn't bend right, then he couldn't bend left, then he wanted to trot at mach 12, then he wanted to buck in the canter and doing a simple 20m circle was a chore. Has someone gotten spoiled? I donno about that, but he gave me two days of solid work and was probably sore since it was two days of really good work. I also don't usually ride on Mondays because he generally works so hard Saturday and Sunday. Who knows, but they're all entitled to off days because they're not machines.

I've been focusing on specific points on him:

From the book,  Beating Muscle Injuries for Horses

• 3: When I find myself having to resort to manually flexing Penn down (like in my lesson with MF), I know his neck is bothering him. I felt this last weekend bending right, so I flinch tested his neck on the right side at point 3. He promptly flinched away, so I dedicated about 7 minutes to treating it with the mini-phaser. I got a very interesting reaction: instead of melting into it like he normally does, he spent 2-3 minutes "kicking at flies" and having big body twitches. Then he suddenly relaxed and settled into it like he always does. I tested his neck after, no flinch response. I've been testing it every day since (7 days so far), no reaction.
• 15/16: These are consistently flinchy spots. I can usually make the flinching go away, but it hasn't stayed away like #3. It's sometimes both, sometimes not, and they don't necessarily match right to left.
• About 4" in front of 15: This is sometimes flinchy directly after riding in the tack. It's failing the flinch test less often now.
• About 4-6" behind 13 (the lowest part of his back): This is sometimes flinchy after riding him bareback. It hasn't been very reactive since I first treated it last Thursday.
• 12: I tried this one thinking it would help with his girthiness. I found out that his girthiness is NOT muscular soreness. It didn't react to the flinch test, and after treating it for 5 minutes, his bitey face was extreme. Sorry bud, I won't do it again. I had another look at it yesterday, and he's got hives and fly bites along his whole underline. They've spent more time outside as the weather has gotten better, so yesterday I sprayed his whole underline with listerine. I think that might be part of his problem, and I'll treat the inside of him again with Abler AbPrazole (which should arrive today).

So massage drunk.

They're doing a run of 10 mini-phasers in 4-6 weeks, and I'll buy one of those (not sure if it's part of the beta test though... I just know I'll be getting one of the 10). In the grand scheme of things you can buy to treat your horse (magnets, massage blankets, BOT stuff), I'd say it's on the upper-mid end of price. You could certainly spend a lot more, but there's many items that cost less. I haven't seen any that work as well though, and certainly none that Penn clearly enjoys as much as the mini-phaser. In a few months, they're looking at a run of 100 units.

I used the mini-phaser on my calves for about a minute each last Saturday (right on top of my clothes, no spray)- my legs were sore from walking down 16 flights of stairs for our evacuation drill at work 3 days before (I couldn't point my toes down without a lot of pain and it hadn't gotten better). It knocked out 95% of the pain immediately and my legs were back to normal within 24 hours. I like the mini-phaser too!

You know what Penn doesn't like? Hock boots. I got him the padded BOT ones. He lasted approximately 30 seconds Thursday night before wigging out kicking, got himself turned completely around in the cross ties, and pulled until his halter broke. He ran off to his stall trembling. So now I get to return the boots and buy a new everyday leather halter!

This is not a selling pitch, I've just had a lot of interest in what I've been doing to Penn: If you’re interested in this pulse system, or for more information on buying your own mini-phaser, or just more information in general, feel free to email me! I’m happy to share the company information with individuals, just not the WWW!

Part 1: So What's Wrong With Penn?

The short answer: We don't know.

The better answer: He seems to be just fine now!

Unrelated, I took this pic after a major thunderstorm rolled through in July.
The moment was gone incredibly quickly.

Starting a couple months ago, he'd come to work a bit uneven, but work out of it. In June, he had a few comments in his free walk about not stepping evenly up front. A month ago, that became a bit more consistent in the trot, but then it wasn't actually consistent enough to get any kind of read on it (or nerve block). All we could gather was he wasn't feeling OK, and that he sometimes stepped short on the right front, but sometimes it was his left front (the right more often though). M took him for a spin and felt what I meant, and agreed that it's weird and inconsistent.

He's been getting adjusted by the Chiropractor on a regular basis. He's getting his vitamins and electrolytes.

One night he just didn't work out of it. He felt super shitty. We hoof tested him for an abscess. Nothing. His toes were long, but he's never reacted that badly to that.

His farrier came out the next night and trimmed him (he was already set to come out). His feet were quite long for 5 weeks in the middle of July. We opted to do four weeks next. I've never done four weeks. Why would we be doing four weeks IN JULY AND AUGUST? Oh yea, because it keeps raining and the grass keeps growing and so the hooves keep growing too.

Lots of hoof.

One of the families at the barn has a Pulse machine (their own design based on a human product- it's really cool) and I decided to give that a try. I hadn't considered them in the past because treatments were just too expensive (ie $200 for a session). They recently lowered the prices substantially, so the night Penn came up really weird, I was like, "Sign Penn up!" It's this neat pulse machine that works the muscles into relaxing by applying pounds of pressure on small pulsing heads that the operator takes down the muscles. It has saved logs of each horse that record data from each visit and treatment, so the more you treat, the better the algorithms become (or something like that. I don't code this type of thing!)

Baseline testing down the spine. I believe it works by directing pulses over each vertebrae and seeing what bodily resistance they meet. Red is very bad, yellow is not good. I am not excellent at reading these charts.

Receiving treatment based on the results of the spine test. (red line)

Finally deciding he likes the treatment. It took a while since it has a cord and sounds a little like clippers.

C worked on Penn for over an hour the same night he got his new toes and had very little impact on his muscles- Penn was still wound extremely tight. He recommended I have Penn tested for Lyme- he's had a few other horses not respond to the pulse machine, and they've all been off the charts for Lyme.

The sensor was showing better results after testing, but physical testing (running a jabby finger down the spine) was still earning the pre-treatment reactions.

I had my vet out two days later to draw blood, and to leave minocycline for Penn to start taking while we waited for results. I was hoping for an "easy" diagnosis. While Lyme is not a great one, it is a TREATABLE one. Aka, please give me something that I can just throw money at and fix it. That's how it was with Mikey's hock: "Ok, he's got chips. Can we fix it? Great. Let's do it." When Mikey died, there was a lot of blood... and all I could think was, "OK, we can fix this. Just put it back in. Where can I buy more?"

Unfortunately his lab results came back with only 'elevated' numbers- nothing that should be causing a physical problem. We opted to do another 10 days of mino (we had done 7 already) just to be sure and to knock out the chance of the problem being anaplasmosis (another tick-borne disease that is also treated with mino). Back to the drawing board.

Second session baseline. Much better.

Interestingly, Penn did improve from his first treatment with the Pulse machine. He was still incredibly reactive, but he tracked a bit better laterally and rode better. I opted to have 2 more visits because I had horse shows coming up and didn't have anything else I could throw at him. C found at the second visit he was still very reactive, but he started to respond to the pulses within the session.

We even worked on the neck some! The yellow line is his baseline, the bars are a check to see how he's reacting.
The chiropractor identified the base of the neck on the right side as a major problem area (last time he worked on Penn he spent a long time on adjusting that part of the horse). C was working on the base of the neck and Penn's muscles gave a huge pop and tension release. It was super neat to watch!

By the third session Penn was absolutely in love with C and every time he'd stop to change a setting or a pulse head, Penn would reach over and be like "Hey, keep going!"

What a great baseline!
His back looked much better, but with some tension way back (to be expected since I had him sitting a ton).

After these visits, Penn went on to absolutely exceed expectations with his first official third level score:

Coincidence? I donno. I'm certainly not messing with it though!

So what's next?

Penn is still moving well. I scheduled him to get pulse treatments the week of and the two weeks before championships (3 weekly treatments). He'll see his chiropractor the same night as the first Pulse treatment. He'll see the farrier at 4 weeks again the night of the second treatment.

All I could gather was that he probably hurt a lot bodily somewhere (or enough all over) and would push unevenly from behind. His left hind is the weak one right now, so the right front being short more often would make sense. When I really rode him, I could make him track evenly.

Coming soon, Part 2: More Pulse Fun!