Today’s Horse Mysteries Now podcast is about equine skin issues.
There’s so many! All with fantastic names: mud fever, rain rot, rain scald, malanders, scratches, grease heel, fly allergies, and more.
Guess what?
They’re all caused by the same things.
Humans just like to name them something different.
Regardless of the name, you can get rid of the skin issues.
Enjoy the podcast!
Summary:
Summary by AI:
In the “Horse Mystery Solved” podcast, Dr. Renee Tucker, a holistic equine veterinarian, discusses various skin issues in horses. She explains that conditions like mud fever, rain rot, and fly allergies are all manifestations of a broader problem: toxins and chemicals in the horse’s body. These toxins, which can come from feed, environmental chemicals, or even vaccines, overload the liver. When the liver can’t process them effectively, the skin becomes a secondary detox organ, leading to skin problems.
Dr. Tucker uses an analogy comparing bacteria and fungi to firemen who clean up after a fire, emphasizing that these organisms are not the cause of skin issues but rather a response to underlying problems. To address these skin conditions, she recommends detoxifying the horse’s system through liver cleanses, energy work, or a new product she’s developing that combines herbal remedies with energy techniques. She concludes by noting that while skin issues might recur due to ongoing environmental toxins, supporting the horse’s liver can significantly help manage and potentially resolve these conditions.
Transcription:
Renee (00:01)
Hello, hello. Good morning. Good morning. Hello, friends. Hi, and welcome to the Horse mystery Solved podcast. I’m Dr. Renee Tucker, a equine holistic veterinarian for about 30 years. Today, I would like to talk about horse skin issues, and we certainly seem to have a lot of them. For example, we’ve got suffolk, fly allergies, and mud fever, scratches, sweet itch, rain scalds, rain rots, malanders. These are all different names for seemingly different skin conditions, depending on where they are in the horse, located on the body, or also what types of Bacteria or fungus that we might find in the general area. So they have different names, and that names definitely depend on the areas of the country as well, and different countries have different names, too. The thing is, is that the skin has a problem. I’m not going to refer to all those different ones. It’s just going to be skin problems, which is any and all of those. I am not referring to in this podcast, hives. Hives is the more allergic-y reaction. There’s bumps all over the skin. Not that one. That’s a different one. I’m talking about all the other ones, and there’s plenty.
Renee (01:25)
For most all of those skin conditions, we do find bacteria and/or funguses, and the regimen is to use something that’s going to kill bacteria and/or funguses. You got to do it a lot. Every day, if not twice a day, and for quite a while, really, usually at least a week. Sometimes it comes back, and sometimes it moves. It’s very strange, but it seems that if you just keep that up, it works. But not for all horses, and not for all areas, particularly the back of the feet, the pasterns, also called grease heel, all that. Let me tell you a little story. As a young veterinary, I worked in Washington State for about 10 years. Love Washington. If you don’t know, Washington State has a lot of rain. It can rain nine months out of the year. Summer is fantastic. But I got there and I’m seeing a lot of mud fever just all over the place. And it made sense. You’d see mud fever on the feet because it’s so wet, and you’d see rain rot on the back because it’s so wet. Even if you have a blanket on, it’s just constantly humid. And it really made sense that the skin can’t dry up, and so the fungus and bacteria come in.
Renee (02:52)
It made sense. And then one day, it was summer, and I was still seeing horses with rain rot and mud fever. And I just thought, Well, wait a minute. I thought it was because it was wet. And it didn’t really make sense. It doesn’t. Still, if you tried the same things, antibacterials, antifungals, eventually it would go away. It didn’t make sense, but it generally would go away. Not always. There are certainly cases where none of that stuff works. So let me tell you a a little analogy. It’s not the greatest analogy in the world, but hopefully it’ll be helpful. Okay, let’s say there’s an alien from another planet, and they’ve decided to come to Earth and do studies about house fires. Yeah, so just your house starts on fire, and the aliens are just perplexed by this, and they want to study it. So all these aliens… Oh, I don’t know how many there are. Okay, it’s a story. So then they come and they research all the housefires, and they have some alert system. So as soon as there’s a housefire that they can see, so it’s a big one, they show up, and they study it, and they see the fire, and they see the walls scrumbling, and they see the firemen, the firetrucks, the people, the ash, they see it all.
Renee (04:19)
And if they study enough house fires, they come up with the result that housefires are caused by firemen because they’re always there. Now for us, we know that’s just so ridiculous, am I right? Because the house fires are caused by so many different causes. I mean, stoves and fireplaces and cigarettes dropping and all kinds of different things that we know the firemen are there to help out. They are there to put out the fire and clean up the mess of the fire and the walls and all that stuff. So it’s a silly analogy, but that hopefully you’ll get my point, is that bacteria and funguses in skin conditions are the firemen. They’re simply there because there’s a fire, there’s something wrong with the skin, and they’re there to help clean up the mess, to put out the fire and clean up the mess. So You say, What? Well, okay, maybe I can follow you, Dr. Nzaka, but what’s causing the fire then? Well, it’s actually pretty simple. It’s the usual cast of characters. Chemicals, toxins, heavy metals, maybe poisons. And some of these things can amalgamate together and you get all kinds of combinations. So there’s a whole bunch, which I’m going to generically call bad stuff, that’s in the horse’s body and it’s trying to get out.
Renee (06:03)
It can be stuck in the skin or the subcutaneous, so it’s trying to get the skin. The other thing that can happen is that these same bad stuff can be inside the horse, and the liver is supposed to be dealing with it, but maybe it’s just overloaded, too busy, having problems, whatever. The liver can’t handle it, and the skin is a secondary filtering organ. And so therefore, the liver will shove it out the skin. Either way, you got a skin problem, and it’s not the skin itself. The skin itself is fine. You try to shove a heavy metal out of skin, it breaks it down some. In fact, if you look at fly allergies, the skin does break down. And even so much that you get some of the serum that oooses out. And unfortunately, flies find this delicious. And they’re thirsty, and they come to drink it. That’s it. And so we say, Oh, once again, here are the flies. It must be fly allergies. Flies, they’re like firemen. Well, firemen I don’t want to drink. As I take a drink, ironic, okay, but whatever. So these things that we see, it’s almost like we’re the aliens.
Renee (07:26)
We see this stuff, then it’s on fire. And we’re like, oh, my Gosh, let’s put it out. We’re just actually killing the firemen. Not the flies. You could get rid of flies any day. I’d be happy with that. But they’re really not causing the problem. They find heavy metals delicious. People that have a lot of heavy metals in them, mosquitoes find you delicious. It’s just strange. I’m not sure how all that works or why it does, but there you go. Different species like different tastes. Okay, so let’s see. Just checking my nose. Oh, you might want to know where would these things come from, and it’s the usual places. So we’ve got all the fertilizers, the pesticides, the herbicides that might be in your hay or your grain or what have you. Also, the processing of grains adds chemicals. Let’s see, vaccinations do it, any pharmaceutical drugs like the antibiotics, whatever. Tranquilizers do it, plenty. All the usual stuff gives you the bad stuff, which is then in your horse who’s trying to get it out, usually with the liver, gets overloaded and puts it out the skin. Unless it came directly on the skin, you said, Well, could that be?
Renee (08:46)
Well, we do have fly sprays, and they do have some chemicals. But then also we have, if you just perchance have a hayfield nearby, if they’re spraying stuff, fertilizers, whatever, it can come over on your land. It can also, I have a lot of people in our asthma group, which is going great, talk about how the dust, if they give their horse just one flake of hay and it’s dusty, They go into an extreme coughing fit. Personally, I question if it’s just dust. Is it dust or is it dust with some chemical toxin, something like that, which would cause It’s just this actual laryngeospasm? Because just dust from dirt, it should not do that. Anyway, that’s a little theory I have going, but I’m pretty sure it’s right. Okay. So you get it from the usual places and it’s stuck in your horse, horse trying to get out. And then it does damage the skin, trying to get out all the bad stuff. Then, since the skin is damaged, the bacteria and the fungus are cleanup crew. You can look at them as opportunists if you want. That’s what they’re generally called. But they do have an opportunity, and they eat dead skin cells, and all the little fragmentations, and all the serum, and all the stuff from broken skin.
Renee (10:13)
That’s what they do. And there we are, killing them. They’re trying to do their job. What can one do? That’s why they keep coming back. So what you really want to do is get rid of the stuff that’s in your horse. And this just pops into my head. So listen, this This is along with everything. What I mean by that. This is my quote. We don’t see any problems, whether they’re medical or lamenesses. We don’t see anything until the horse has used up all of their regular ways of dealing with stuff. So we only see problems when the horse cannot compensate anymore. That’s when we see it. Only then. So if you have a skin issue that’s chronic, then you have an issue in your horse’s body that’s just been adding up and adding up over time. It’s not anybody’s fault. There is so many toxins in the world. It’s insanity land. Okay, that’s that story. I wanted to tell you one more story just because it was interesting to me. Okay? And then I’ll tell you what you can try to do with the skin stuff. It was just an interesting thing that happened a long way back when I was in Oregon.
Renee (11:31)
I lived in Washington, and then across the Bridge is Oregon. And I had been working with this group of horses at one barn for almost 10 years, maybe eight, whatever. And I saw them every one to two months, and they were fine. Then they had an opportunity to purchase a place which was a little bit bigger, so they moved there. And it wasn’t far, a 10-minute drive, so same city. And they moved their horses, and I saw them a month later. And there was one horse who had this little strange scrape by its Hawk. And it’s those scrapes that you often see. And generally, me and everybody tends to think, Oh, the horse just scraped himself when he was laying down, and then he got up and it scraped. No big deal. The thing is about those little scrapes, the little scrapes by the Hawk, they’re generally a vertical line, maybe two, three inches, four inches, depending on the size of the horse. So a vertical line up and down, and they’re about less than half an inch wide. And the key is they’re not on the bony protuberance. They’re not on the sticking out part of the bones by the hop.
Renee (12:49)
Because if the horse was really rubbing or kicked itself when it’s trying to get up, it would really hit the the bony part first. That’s the part that’s sticking out. And in none of these little scrapes by the hop, do you see that they’re always in between the bony sticking out parts? They’re in the trough,. So I went to this barn in Oregon for the first month after their move, and there’s one horse with a little scrape. It was a pretty good scrape, and they’re like, Oh, it’s so weird. I’m like, Yeah, it’s weird. And everyone thought, including me, that there was something in either the pasture or the stalls or wherever, the fence line. They checked everywhere. I come back a month later. All of them on both hogs have these scrapes, and they’re going crazy. I’m like, Wait, what? You didn’t have this for 10 years. You move here and nobody can find a thing that they’re all… And there was 10 horses, by the way. Did I mention that? There was 10 horses that all had these scrapes on both hogs within two months of moving. It was crazy. Nothing else was wrong.
Renee (14:00)
Everything else seemed fine. They had the same hay they had brought over. They had everything was the same. And then they had that. So yes, long story short, that little scrape that looks like a horse’s just kicked itself or injured itself getting up. It’s not a scrape. It turned out, I can’t remember if it was a chemical or toxin, but there was a chemical and/or toxin in the water supply. And the horses, for some reason, were not able to deal with with their liver, and it went out the skin by the hocks. And that part by the hoch is just where a bunch of arteries, veins, lymph nodes, and they’re safe, if you will, because they’re in between the bony perturburances, the little bumps of the hocks. The scrape is in between the bumps. So that was super interesting because then they were able to get a filter on the water and all the scrapes went away. So that was cool. I just thought that was a cool story. You know what I’m saying? So that was that. So you’re going to say, okay, if my horse has a skin problem of any kind, yes, any kind, it is the bad stuff.
Renee (15:15)
Toxins, heavy metals, chemicals, et cetera. There’s more than that. You can do two things. Well, three, technically. You can certainly do a liver cleanse, any herbal liver cleanse, also called liver support, which will help the liver to flush it out. That can definitely help. Number two, you can also do it energetically. I do Tucker biokinetic technique energy work, so you can become a TBT practitioner or look on our practitioner page and hire somebody to do that for you. And the third thing that I am working on, and it’s going to be awesome, is I’m putting that Tucker biokinetic technique energy into a product. So it’s just a little bit, tiny scoop of some herbs for the skin, but it’s really the energy that’s going to clear it out. Now, if you do that one, your skin condition is going to look a little bit worse for a little while. A little while, I don’t know. It’s going to depend how long was it there, how much of a buildup is in the body. And the body is like, Oh, my gosh, something has helped me clear this out. Hallelujah. And it’s going to look a a little bit worse.
Renee (16:31)
I’m thinking a couple of days at most a week, and then it’s going to heal up just like that. Now, will it ever come back? Given the current environment of very toxic everywhere stuff, Probably eventually, however, it really shouldn’t because we’re going to give the horse so much availability of its immune system to deal with stuff because that overload of toxins, chemicals, et cetera, is a drag, such a drag on the immune system. The body just can’t deal with it all. Too much in our environment. Same for people, but it’s just a big mess. But I hope this simplifies it. I got people with terrible summer sores, and they’re just open wounds on the horse. Of course, the flies love that, and the bacteria and the funguses show up to try and clean it. And they’ve done everything. All the antibiotics, all the topical cleaners. It’s not working. And I know a couple of people, they just did the liver stuff, and the summer soar cleared right up. I know it seems a little weird because really, we’re aliens from another planet who think that the firemen caused fires. But no, bacteria and funguses do not cause skin problems.
Renee (17:49)
They’re just a cleanup crew. Okay? I know I’ve repeated myself a bit. I hope that made it clear rather than muddled. So please Just do a liver cleanse. You can check out my skin product. It’ll be in the description as soon as it’s ready. It’s coming soon. I’ll talk to you guys next time. I will be sending out an email about our next live YouTube podcast, and they’re also on audio, of course. Then if you have any questions, though, then you can send them in ahead of time, and I can get to those if you have any about that particular topic. Anyways, thanks for your time. I always appreciate you guys listening, and I will talk to you guys later. Bye-bye.
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8 Comments on “Podcast Episode 55: Equine Skin Issues — NOT Bacteria or Fungus”
Liver cleanse vs a chelation process? Thoughts.
Weird skin issue going on for years. Started chelation after a horse hair analysis this spring.
Thanks for your time.
Hi Jess,
Either one would be fine. Obviously they work differently, but both are good. I hope it helps for your horse.
Renee
Hi Dr Tucker, thanks for another extremely interesting podcast. Following on from that, what are your thoughts on sarcoids please.
Thank you Sue. Sarcoids deserves it’s on podcast (it’s on the list). Think of sarcoids as a “car crash pileup”. Lots of toxins/chemicals/heavy metals/etc. trying to get out all at the same spot. And they’re stuck and piling up. While a liver cleanse might theoretically help, it’s unlikely because everything is stuck in the skin.
Best,
Renee
Would this also apply to Sarcoids too please ?
Yes, Inga, it is exactly the same idea. A liver cleanse, however, would not likely help. As the stuff that is trying to leave the body is stuck in the skin (in the sarcoid).
Best,
Renee
I use quite a bit of Ultra Shield Fly Spray on my mare in fly season. I know it has to be less than good for her, but I’ve tried other (natural, less severe) sprays and I’ve tried letting her naturally cope (with the help of some supplements like garlic and sweet itch herbals) and she just ends up COVERED in bites and miserable. Oh and haven’t been able to find a fly sheet that stays on her. Any recommendations/suggestions on what I can do to give her protection/relief, without the use of the harsh chemical fly sprays?
Sorry to hear about the fly difficulties. The problem with chemical fly sprays is that the chemicals absorb into the skin. The flies are trying to get to the chemicals. I’d suggest a liver cleanse/support product to help her liver. Then she won’t seem so “tasty” to the flies.
I realize in some areas the flies are horrendous. However, if she is less “tasty”, then the flies will go to other animals instead of her.
Good luck,
Renee Tucker, DVM