The Unhealthy Horse:
What Does It Really Mean When a Horse Is Unhealthy?
All of us who've owned horses for any length of time have faced health problems of one kind or another with a horse. Whether it was a relatively minor problem like a chronic cough or a major problem like EPM, health problems are not unusual in horses. Statistics show that health problems are on the rise for the human population in the United States, and although I haven't been able to find data on horse health problems, from what I've seen personally, I believe they're on the rise, too.
Even if your horse is not currently having a health problem, chances are you're doing something in the way of prevention. Maybe you give a variety of regular vaccines, maybe you use wormers as a preventive measure, maybe you have your horse regularly examined by a veterinarian, maybe you use nutritional supplements and vitamins. Just open any horse magazine and look at the full-page ads near the front--the ads that are the most expensive and reserved for the big, regular advertisers. Most of the products advertised in those ads have something to do with horse health. This tells us that large quantities of those products are being sold (otherwise, the companies couldn't afford such expensive advertising), which tells us that lots of horse owners are doing lots of things (and spending lots of money) to maintain the health of their horses.
There are many different ways a horse can be unhealthy: From showing minor symptoms that go away fairly fast, like a cough, to major diseases like EPM and Cushings Disease ... from progressive diseases like arthritis which can eventually debilitate a horse, to nuisance conditions like white line disease which seem to hang on but which we can work around. And, probably the most feared of all, when your horse develops a problem which can't be isolated, that is, when the vet can't determine exactly what's wrong and has to go with guesses or most probable causes.
But what does it mean when your horse is unhealthy? Whatever kind of health problem your horse might have, the ultimate cause can be summed up in the following sentence: It represents the failure of the body's self-healing mechanism. Let's look at that more closely by using an example of a condition that affects both horses and humans--cancer.
Cancer is nothing more than a failure of the immune system. It's actually perfectly normal to have malignant cells. They pop up in everyone’s body all the time. Everyone has malignant cells in them. They develop as sort of a mistake, if you will, in cell replication. But the body has the ability to recognize these abnormal cells and destroy them. The immune system, which is part of the body’s self-healing mechanism, is responsible for that. It happens all the time--malignant cells pop up, but the body recognizes and destroys them so that they don’t have the opportunity to get out of hand, to get a foothold. When the malignant cells do get out of hand and get a foothold, we then say that someone "has cancer." This means either that the body didn’t recognize the cells as malignant or didn’t destroy them when they first popped up ... and they got out of hand. In other words, there has been a failure of the immune system, and, since the immune system is part of the self-healing system, there has thus been a failure of the self-healing system.
Let's think about that for a minute. Your body has the ability to recognize a malignant (or abnormal) cell almost the very moment it appears, and it also has the ability to destroy that abnormal cell. That happens every second of every minute of every hour of every day of your life. And this self-healing mechanism doens't apply just to malignant cells, it applies to every part of your body, even DNA. Mistakes in DNA can occur when it replicates, and existing DNA can be damaged by external influences. Yet the body actually has the capability to detect and repair defective DNA, and it does so every second. Every organ in your body, every bodily process ... everything right down to the cellular level is constantly being monitored for defects or damage, and when they are found, they are either corrected or eliminated. It has to be that way, or no life could exist.
Life is a dangerous thing, and in the normal course of life, things happen....from the DNA level to the cellular level, to the organ level, to the bone level, to the skin level....damage occurs all the time, some as a result of normal wear and tear and injuries, and some as a result of outside influences like bacteria, viruses, and damaging kinds of radiation. Yet the body is a self-healing machine, alert to this damage, alert to outside invaders, and springs into action with self-healing mechanisms. This happens all the time; it’s a never-ending process. The body of any living thing is and must be in a constant state of defense and constant state of repair.
When your horse is unhealthy, it means that your horse's self-healing mechanism has failed. This is true for all health problems and all diseases, which are themselves nothing more than symptoms of the failure of the self-healing mechanism. The body of any living thing, your horse included, is a combination of countless different systems and mechanisms, all interdependent and working together in a balanced and harmonious way. When it all works together, balanced and harmonious, we say that the body is in a state of health, or, as we prefer, wellness. The self-healing mechanism is working to detect imbalance and disharmony and restore balance and harmony. But when it fails, imbalance and disharmony reign, to one extent or another, and we say that the body is unhealthy ... and the symptoms of this state of unhealth are termed "disease."
So ... now the question is: Why does the self-healing mechanism fail? There are two main reasons: The self-healing mechanism can be overwhelmed by detrimental influences or can be weakened by the lack of supportive influences. Let's look first at being overwhelmed by detrimental influences, using the example of a pond. Imagine for a minute that we have a pond, and in that pond we have all kinds of fish and insects and plants. Everything reaches a balance....there’s plenty for the fish to eat, there’s plenty for the insects to eat, and the plants have an environment they can thrive in. The pond goes along pretty good. Now let’s assume that some runoff water from the road starts getting into our pond. That runoff water is contaminated with whatever was on the road....oil, gas, diesel fuel, antifreeze, rubber from tires, pollution from things thrown out on the side of the road....whatever. But, it’s not much runoff water, and there aren’t too many pollutants getting into the pond, so the pond is able to absorb them, and the pond goes on supporting the fish, insects, and plants. But let’s assume a busy 6-lane highway is built near our pond, with lots of big trucks going by, and there’s a lot more runoff water contaminated with a lot more gas, oil, tire rubber, etc. A few industries get built by the highway, and they dump waste water (treated, of course) into the stream that feeds our pond. So eventually a lot more pollutants flow into our pond. The pond gets polluted to the point where insects start dying, fish start dying, and plants start dying. The pollution keeps coming in, and eventually there’s nothing alive in our pond....it’s just a big hole of polluted water.
What’s happened here? Well, the pond used to be in balance...then a little pollution started coming in, but it was just a little, and the pond could handle it. The pond wasn’t overwhelmed, which means that the systems could maintain balance. But then after the highway was built, so much pollution came in that the pond couldn’t handle it, the balance was lost, and the pond was overwhelmed. We can say, in a nutshell, that outside influences, destructive to the balance of the pond, came in to such an extent that they overwhelmed the pond’s ability to maintain balance. The pond had the natural ability to deal with a certain amount of destructive outside influences and in spite of them could maintain a balance, but there was a point where the destructive outside influences were so great that the pond could no longer maintain a balance.
So, the self-healing mechanism sometimes fails because it is overwhelmed by destructive outside influences. Now let's look at another possiblity, using the example of tomato plants. I love tomato sandwiches, and in the summer, I could happily eat tomato sandwiches every day for as long as I could get fresh tomatoes. Let's imagine I decide to grow some tomato plants. There are all kinds of animals around here, and I know that if I just set the plants out, the squirrels and rabbits might get more in the way of food from them than I will, which has happened before. So I decide to be smart and put them in the house, in pots. Since I don't want the house to appear messy, I put them in an extra bathroom, which has no windows. The problem is, my tomato plants don't grow. They get yellow and weak looking and finally just fall over. What happened? Well, I didn't allow for proper supportive influences, i.e. sunlight, fresh air, and other environmental aspects of being outside. The way I tried to grow my tomatoes prevented them from receiving the supportive influences that were essential.
To summarize what we've said so far, a health problem with your horse represents a failure of the horse's self-healing mechanism, and that failure is either caused by destructive outside influences or the lack of supportive influences. The result of that failure is called a disease, or health problem. That means that a disease or health problem is ultimately nothing more than a symptom of a failure of the self-healing mechanism.
The self-healing mechanism is designed to detect problems when they first show up, before they get out of hand and become a disease. If for some reason the self-healing mechanism fails and a disease develops, the self-healing mechanism may still be able to restore balance, but there are two points to consider: First, it takes time to restore balance when it has been disrupted by a full-blown disease or health problem. It's like cutting your finger--a little nick will heal fast, but a big gash will take a long time. Second, remember that the presence of a disease or health problem indicates that the self-healing mechanism has failed, and as long as the disease is present, we know that the self-healing mechanism is still in a failure state. In order for healing to occur, we must remove the cause of that failure. That's an essential point to understand--The disease is there in the first place because of a failure of the self-healing mechanism, and healing, or the restoration of balance, will not be possible as long as that failure persists. So, when faced with a horse health problem, the first question to ask is, "Why did the self-healing mechanism fail?" The only way to truly restore health and balance is to address the cause of that failure.
If you look, though, at the conventional medical approach (or school medicine approach, as the Europeans say), you will find that it concentrates not on the cause of the failure of the self-healing mechanism but on the symptoms of that failure. Let's take the example of a cough. Years ago I had a horse who developed a chronic cough. At first the veterinarian gave the horse a sort of cough suppressant, thinking that the cough was just a temporary, minor problem and would soon go away. But it didn't. So then he told me that the horse might have some kind of lung infection and gave me a bunch of syringes filled with antibiotics, and I was supposed to give the horse a shot of that every day. That didn't work either. The cough continued several more weeks, until it rained. The summer had been unusually dry, and apparently something about the dry weather irritated the horse and produced the cough, and when the dry spell was finally over, the cough went away. I never did determine exactly what about the dry weather irritated this horse and why he was more susceptible to it than the other horses, who weren't coughing. But the point is that the "help" I got from traditional medicine consisted of fighting the symptoms--either the cough itself or a suspected lung infection. Even assuming the horse had had a lung infection, the antibiotic I gave him was targeted only at the assumed infection--it would do nothing to address the question of why he might have developed a lung infection in the first place.
Let's look at this in the context of human medicine. Assume you go to the doctor and he tells you that you have cancer. He’ll probably want to do two things. First, he’ll want to do surgery to remove the cancer, then he’ll want you to take some sort of treatments--chemotherapy and radiation--to try to destroy any cancer left over. We said that cancer is a failure of the self-healing system. The traditional way of treating cancer is to get rid of the evidence of the failure, so to speak....to surgically remove as much cancer as possible and then kill the rest through some sort of treatment program. The cause of the failure of the self-healing system, which allowed malignant cells to remain in the body, is not addressed to any meaningful extent. This means that as the cancer is "treated," the cause is still there, allowing malignant cells to survive, giving us more and more to "fight." A surgeon told me recently that during the past 75 years, the incidence of malignant melanomas has increased by 1000%, and the rate of increase is increasing. Yet the focus is still on treatment. And that’s the way virtually all conventional medicine is, including conventional alternative medicine. If you have high blood pressure, they might tell you to stop eating salt and give you a pill that will push the blood pressure down, but again, the ultimate cause of the high blood pressure is not addressed. If you have stomach pains, they might tell you that your stomach is producing too much acid and give you a pill to make it produce less acid, but they don’t address why too much acid was produced in the first place. If a child misbehaves in school, they give the child a pill to make it behave, but they don’t address why the child was misbehaving....and on and on. They attack the results of a failure of the self-healing system, the results of imbalances in the body.
In the horse world, using both conventional medical approaches and conventional alternative approaches, the results of imbalances are targeted--whether they be manifest as health problems, hoof problems, or behavioral problems. Assume a horse develops some sort of hoof problem. The conventional approach is to come in with some kind of shoeing or trimming or therapeutic method to compensate for that problem...which means, to make the horse usable in spite of the problem--if a horse's feet are weak and contracted, put shoes and pads on to "protect" the feet and enable the horse to be ridden on trail rides. The reasons for the weak, contracted feet are not addressed, and so despite the assumed protection from the shoes and pads, the horse continues to have weak, contracted feet.
Let's go a little farther with that example and illustrate how we prefer to approach problems. In the absence of birth defects, that horse was born with the imbedded blueprint for adequate feet, programmed inside the body in ways we cannot even begin to understand. The self-healing mechanism of the horse's body works to negate harmful influences and maintain adequate, healthy feet. The presence of weak, contracted feet indicates that the self-healing mechanism has failed, either due to overwhemling detrimental influences or the lack of supportive influences, or most probably, a combination of both. The ultimate answer to the problem of weak, contracted feet is not insulating the feet with pads and shoes so that the horse can continue to be used in spite of the problem. The answer is to attempt to identify and remove the overwhelming detrimental influences and insure the presence of supportive influences. That approach addresses the ultimate cause of weak, contracted feet. And notice that we're not searching for some magic medication, herbal remedy, or supplement that will compensate for the detrimental influences or artifically provide supportive influences. We believe we should try to avoid compensating for a problem.
If the faucet on your bathroom sink is stuck running full force and won't turn off, the sink will fill up, and water will run over into the floor. The conventional treatment approach (surgery or therapeutic) is like installing a drain in the bathroom floor so that the water can drain on out when it hits the floor, instead of puddling up and running all through the house. The compensatory treatment approach (usually associated with medications and conventional alternatives) is like installing a bigger drain in the sink itself so that the water won't run out of the sink. Both approaches attempt to deal with the water problem, not the faucet problem; one approach confines the water to the bathroom, while the other approach confines the water to the sink. But both leave the water running. Our approach is what we consider to be the simple, common sense approach--fix the faucet and turn it off. Is that not what you would try to do? Why then do we accept letting the water run on and on, so to speak, when faced with health problems? Is it because we think fixing the faucet and turning the water off is impossible? Or is it because we can't see that the faucet is running, and all we can see is that water is pouring from the sink onto the floor?
I believe that, as far as health problems and disease are concerned, we really can't see that the faucet is running. We see the water running out of the sink, and that's all we see. We might become so preoccupied with symptoms (the water running out of the sink), that we focus all our attention there. In the case of white line disease, for example, we get preoccupied with that big crater in the toe area, and all we can think about is doing something about that big crater. It seems to be "the problem," and it's what we want to make go away. We tend to think of the symptoms as representing the totality of the real problem, so we might not see the need to look anywhere else.
But I think there's another, more important reason why we can't see that the faucet is running--in order to see the faucet, we have to look in directions we're not accustomed to looking in. We live in a society where we try to explain all things in terms of either the physical or the chemical, and that's reflected in the way we approach disease and health problems. Take founder research, for example. The physical aspect of it is looking at the physical changes in the foundered hoof, trying to find out what happens to the lamina themselves to cause them to loose their holding power--it's looking at the things that can be seen and measured. Even if the seeing is through advanced methods like electron microscopes and MRI's, it's still just seeing and measuring. The chemical aspect is looking at various chemical reactions in the digestive tract, in the blood stream, or in the cells of the lamina themselves, plus it's chemically measuring the levels of certain steriods or enzymes or whatever in the body. Founder research is limited to the combination of physical images and measurements and descriptions of the chemical reactions and the levels of certain chemical combinations in the body...and those in the mainstream, including those in the alternative mainstream, aren't looking anywhere else. Why not? Because, when you think about it, we view all things as being explained by either physical or chemical means, and we don't consider things that lie outside the chemical and physical realms. Thus, in the case of health problems and disease, we never see the faucet; in fact, we have no conception that there is such a thing as a faucet, because this faucet, in the case of health problems, lies outside the realm of the physical and chemical....and thus, from a conventional way of thinking, doesn't exist.
Our goal is simple--to minimize detrimental influences and maintan supportive influences. In order to really understand the meaning of destructive and supportive influences, we have to be willing to go beyond not only the methods of traditional and conventional but also beyond their ways of understanding things. We have to be willing to consider things a little differently and not limit ourselves solely to physical and chemical aspects. We have to be willing to consider things that can't be seen and measured--we have to allow our minds to go beyond the limits of the scientific laboratory, even as advanced as we believe those laboratories are. And that's not easy. It's not easy because we basically live in and are conditioned to a physical and chemical society where we imagine that everything can be explained in physical and chemical terms. But why try to limit the workings of the Universe to the physical and chemical? Why not be open to the possibility that there's much more to reality than what our limited methods can discover in the laboratory?
