80-90% of Sacroiliac (SI) problems are NOT caused by the sacroiliac joint itself.

If the issue was solely the SI joint, then a simply chiropractic adjustment would fix the problem.

Instead, so many horses are in constant SI pain; getting their SI joints injected which sometimes helps, sometimes does not.

And some of them are even being put down for this issue.

It’s so sad because it is very fixable.

Find out the three real reasons for SI issues, and what you can do about them in today’s podcast.

Links Mentioned:
https://wheredoesmyhorsehurt.com/practitioners/

Transcript:
Renee (00:00)
Hello, hello. Good morning, afternoon, evening. Welcome to this episode of Horse mystery Salt. If you don’t know me already, I’m Dr. Renee Tucker, holistic equine, veterinarian for about 30 years. Today, I’d like to talk about sacroiliac issues and what’s really causing them. Now, I have touched on this a little bit in the past in podcast or emails, but it’s such a big issue, and I’d really like to put it all together. And I would like to do it in a fun way that you can let me know if you find helpful or not. So what I’d like to do is share a completely made up conversation that I’m having with a young veterinarian, whom I’m naming Julia. Julia has just graduated from vet school six months ago. Her parents put her through vet school, so she had no stress at all. Didn’t have to work a second job like some people did. Anyways, So I’m entering Julia, and she’s calling me with a horse with a sacriotiliag problem. Okay. Again, this is totally made up. All right. So here am I. Hi, Julia. How’s it going? Well, I have also the sacrileag problem. I’m going not to see it today.

Renee (01:18)
Oh, that’s good. Do you know anything about it? No. Just that the chiropractor has been adjusting it every 30 days, and that’s not working. Ha, ha, ha. Okay, well, what’s your plan? I’m just going to inject it, of course. I know how to do it. I’ve seen some videos on it. Okay, well, injecting will help. Well, I got to go. Okay, bye. Dang it. Julia? She’ll call back. Okay. The sacriolium joint, also called the SI, is in between the sacrum and the ilium. And she knows this and has been trained now to inject it. Injections aren’t wrong per se. Injections symptoms calm down all the inflammation and can take the pain away, make it feel so much better. In and of themselves, it’s not like they’re terrible. However, they’re not getting to the primary cause. Oh, wait, she’s calling again. Here we are. Dr. Tucker, the injection went fine. It was great for about two days. Okay, and no one happened? Well, yeah, they said it was great for two days, and then it just went bad So what else can I do? Should I inject it again? No, no, Julia. Listen, I know you know how to inject things.

Renee (02:37)
Oh, and it’s super fun. Yes, and I know it’s fun. Injections are very powerful. But you know what else is powerful, Julia? What? What else is powerful is knowledge, Julia, and wisdom. That’s why you hired me for your mentor, remember? Oh, yeah. What do you got to say? Okay, Julia, what else did you learn in vet school about the sacroiliac joint. What do you mean? What else? Well, what’s the purpose of it? Well, I don’t know. It’s there in the pelvis, and it’s a joint, so I inject it. Okay, Julia, they all have purposes. So the purpose of the sacroiliac joint is for the power for the hind leg to be transferred from that powerful hind leg through going forward to the front of the horse. It’s a transfer joint. Transfer joint? I never heard of that. Well, it’s true. It’s not like an official term, but that’s what it does. That’s why it’s so big between Two powerful bones. Okay, so I inject it again? No, no, no. What could be going wrong with the sacroiliac joint besides the actual joint capsule itself? Because that’s all you’re doing with an injection is adding more fluid and anti-inflammatory stuff to the joint capsule.

Renee (04:06)
So you want to know what made it inflamed? Yes, Julia. I want to know why it’s inflamed in the first place. I have no idea. They didn’t teach me that in vet school. Yes, I know, Julia. That’s all good. They teach how to deal with pain in vet school, and Let’s talk about the real reason so we can track these things down to a primary cause. Okay, what do I do? First, you have to look at the feet. What? That’s what the farrier does. Okay, Julia, the farrier will trim the feet, possibly deal with shoes, but you have to pick them up and look at them. Okay, so what do I look for? You look for the medial lateral balance. You can look at them from behind. You look at the feet and look to see that the heels are the same height on the inside and the outside. But you also need to pick up the foot and look straight down over it to see if the heels are balanced. If the heels are not balanced, then that imbalance on the feet transfers all the way up to the sacrolyax and makes them imbalance, too.

Renee (05:23)
So then if they’re imbalanced, they’re overloaded. Okay, I get that. Great. So are you saying that if there’s a problem in the leg and it’s not the foot, then I should inject all the joints in the leg? No, Julia, you don’t have to do that. Okay, so if you have a sacralia problem and the foot is even, it doesn’t mean that the whole rest of the leg is wrong. In fact, generally, it’s not. If there is a known for sure painful sacralia cardiac joint that doesn’t respond to just regular easy chiropractic work, then likely the problem is not in the leg. I say that because if there was a hock misalignment or stifle or hip, then generally, if that’s a primary cause, a primary problem, then that joint is going to be the one that’s hurting. Certainly, if you have anything wrong with any joint in the leg, it could contribute to sacroiliac problems. But generally speaking, that sacroiliac, it’s like the tip of the iceberg. I would say at least 80% of the time, 80% of the time, there is some other problem causing the sacroiliac to hurt. So far, little Julia is checking the medialateral balance of the hoofs.

Renee (06:53)
The next thing that she’s going to check, except that she doesn’t know how because she can’t do it because she hasn’t been through my class yet, is checking the pelvic symphasis. She’s going to join my class, or she’s going to hire a TBT practitioner, which is what I teach. Anyways, the pelvic symphasis is the bottom of the pelvis, and it’s the middle center. If it’s crooked, it will make the whole box of the pelvis crooked. And as soon as the pelvis is crooked, that’s going to put uneven stress on both sacrileic joints, and they will get inflamed and start hurting. Now, when that happens, this transfer of power that I’m talking about from the leg through the sacrileic and forward stops happening efficiently, or sometimes it stops happening at all. There’s plenty of horses who are dead lame from sacroliac problems, and it’s so painful. I totally have sympathy because I’ve had sacrileic problems throughout my life. Sometimes the right one, sometimes the left one. Like, what the heck? So the symptoms are so variable. It’s mostly a lack of impulsion because that transfer joint is not working, so it’s not transferring the forward motion.

Renee (08:15)
Sometimes you can’t get a horse collected. They won’t get underneath themselves. They certainly don’t want to talk tight around barrels jumping. They won’t pick up their feet. They’re knocking over rails. You just want to think about the transfer of power and say, Okay, well, if that’s not working, what will happen? Plenty of things, right? All those things that I mentioned, the transfer power is not happening. So the horse doesn’t want to move forward. They can definitely be lame, as I mentioned, and sometimes just off, sometimes just weak. I have people say that sometimes they’re riding along and it feels like their horse tripped and stumbled in a hole, and they look back, and there isn’t a hole. It just feels like something is funky or chunky, or like I’ve also heard the expression, a square peg in a round hole. All those type of things are little clues that your sacroliac is not working right. So if your feet are balanced medial to lateral, that’s the main thing for sacroliac. The next main thing is the pelvic synthesis. Now, that is the bottom center of the pelvis, like I mentioned, it’s like a foundation of a house in that it can cause everything above it to be crooked.

Renee (09:38)
Problem with that one is you can’t see it. And veterans have not yet figured out how to inject that thing. Thank the Lord. It’s way deep in there. Hopefully, that will never happen. And what you need to do is look for a couple of clues that might help you know the pelvic synthesis is misaligned. Of course, one of the clues would be reoccurrence sacrolytic problems, for sure. Other clue, though, is if the horse does any what is called bunny hopping when they’re cantering. So when they’re cantering and they accidentally keep their hind legs together, and hop like a bunny while they’re cantering. It looks really weird. You’re like, What is the horse doing? It’s because that pelvic symphasis is sore when they move their hind legs a lot, so they keep it together. Like, Sometimes you’ll see this for a little bit in youngsters. Horses under two years old, they might get a little bit of bunny hopping, but they can grow out of it because as they grow and expand their bones, then they can expand also the pelvic symphasis synthesis, and it just clicks right back into place. So it’s no big deal if you have a youngster who’s bunny hopping for a little bit of time.

Renee (10:52)
But if you have an older horse who does any bit of bunny hopping, you have 100% got a pelvic synthesis problem. Okay. Other signs is that they will always want to put one of their hind feet forward. They don’t want to stand square. And not only is it just forward, but it’ll be forward and in front of the other foot. It could be just a bit in front, or it could be completely lined up. I don’t know what you call that, vertically, laterally? Straight in front of the other hind foot. Some horses I’ve even place one hind foot and they rest it on the other hind foot consistently. So if all the time they’re doing strange things that remind you of a ballerina, that’s not right. They may, yes, turn their foot out with a pelvic symphysis issue. However, if they’re just standing and turning their foot out, generally, the first thing I look at is the hip, but it certainly could be pelvic symphysis as well. Okay, so those are symptoms that are typical for pelvic symphysis: bunny hopping, uneven standing, particularly if they want to put the same foot in front of the other foot.

Renee (12:14)
That’s pretty much a guarantee for pelvic symphysis. Unfortunately, there’s not any physical checkups that you can do for pelvic symphasis. It’s these other ones, other symptoms that are happening, like sacrolytic problems or standing fine. The pelvic pelvis itself doesn’t really have any pain sensors because it’s like, again, the bottom of the house. It’s the concrete pad on the bottom. If it’s crooked, it’s not cracked, it’s not broken, there’s nothing technically wrong with it, so it’s not hurting. It’s just crooked. It shifts the whole pelvis. To my knowledge, there is not much you can do to fix that other than TBT. Tbt is my energy technique, Tucker biokinetic technique. There are ways of trying to push and coax the tuberousiae. That’s the bone that sticks out right by the tail head. You can try to do some massages and stretches on that. That is listed in video in my reverse the diagnosis book, if you’re interested in that. It’s just something you can try. It doesn’t work 100%. Everybody out there, please hire a TBT person to fix your pelvic symphasis. It’s pretty simple. It’s in our Skeletal Alignment section of the TBT University. So you can also hire people to do that for distance.

Renee (13:41)
Our practitioner pages W www. Where doesmyhorsehurt. Com/practitioners, if you’re interested. Okay, what else is going to tell you guys? Carrying on. Let’s say your pelvic symphasis is aligned and the sacriotelial act itself is aligned. What else do we have that could be a problem? Let me tell you what this problem is all over the place. Guys, chronically, most all horses, I mean, like 80, 90% of them are having joint issues. I mean, it used to be. I know, I’m showing my age again. Seriously. But it used to be. You didn’t do joint injections. You didn’t do joint supplements until a horse was older, at least 15. I know that probably many of you don’t remember that time, but you didn’t inject horses that were two years old because you’re supposed to, or you’re just maintaining them. What a bunch of hoey. No, there’s a problem. Okay, here’s the problem. What we have is a little bit twofold. We have so many toxins and chemicals and heavy metals, etc, in our environment, in the food, etc, that our liver are overloaded. The liver is supposed to, as part of its job, make components of our ligaments.

Renee (15:13)
Now, what do ligaments do? They connect bones to bone. So on the one hand, there are ligaments that will be around my shoulder, for example, and keep my arm from falling off my body. Useful, for sure. There are also, though, ligaments that will keep my shoulder joint from being too squished. They’re like this amazing design, this amazing setup that both keeps bones from going too far apart and too close together. When the incorrect or not enough ligament components are not being made by the liver, then what’s typically happening is the part where the ligaments keep the joints from squishing is not happening. The ligaments are not holding up all the pressure of all the weight of the horse, et cetera, and all the joints are squishing. Horses have two small of joints all over their body. They have too little joint fluid, of course, because the joints are squished. Joints are smaller, you can’t get enough joint fluid in there. And then so, veterians are looking at this too little joint fluid and to incorrect joint fluid because it can’t get flushed through because it’s too squished. And they’re like, Hey, let’s fix the joint fluid.

Renee (16:38)
Let’s inject it with joint fluid. And it can help for sure, but that’s not the cause. So we’ve got Squish joints everywhere, not only in the legs, but in the whole back. Everything is just getting squished. You may see that in the movement of a lot of horses. Now, I’m not trying to make anybody feel it here. But I remember, sorry, again, I remember seeing horses moving out in the field, and they’re effortless, and they’re just bing, bing off the ground, and it’s light, and you’re just stunned by how can 1,200 pounds be that light and lifted and beautiful. And it is a rare, rare day when I see that anymore. And that’s because of the heavy metals being bad and affecting the liver who are not making the right ligament stuff, and the ligaments are unfortunately unable to do their full job, and the joints are getting squished. They’re squished all over. Yes, giving joint supplementation could be helpful But again, that’s not the primary problem. Trying to add more joint fluid into a smaller joint doesn’t really work. It can help maybe a little, but not really. And I feel I feel like a lot of my clients are saying that the joint supplementation, whatever it is, injectable or oral, it’s not working like it used to.

Renee (18:09)
It’s because the joints are smaller. They’re supposed to be more open, more big, more fluffy. Okay, what do you do? What we do is, one, we need to clean out the liver, help the liver as much we can with a liver cleanse, liver support, that type of thing. So that’s one thing. The other thing that I know you don’t like hearing, but I’ll tell you again, stop deworming the horse. The worms that we have deemed as terrible, first of all, you want to think, Well, who deemed it that way? Who’s benefiting from that? My point being, parasites in the horse and human and everything are the first line of defense against heavy metals. Parasites in the gut eat or absorb I’m not sure how they do that, but they take up heavy metals, and when they’re full, they poop out. It’s a good thing to see worms in your poop. Well, not in your poop. That would freak me out. But anyways, the point is that worms, parasites, as we call them, are the first line defensive against heavy metals. So that’s what they’re supposed to be doing. The liver is supposed to be able to just say, Oh, heavy metal?

Renee (19:27)
She go to the gut. And the parasites then suck up the heavy metal so it doesn’t damage the intestine. And then when they’re full, they go out. All right? So what’s happening is there are no parasites in the intestine. The liver, therefore, knows if it dumps the heavy metals into the gut, the gut gets damaged, may even get ulcers. See how this all is one big ball of wax, I’m trying to detangle. So the answer is Try to avoid as much toxins, heavy metals, et cetera, as possible. We’ve talked about that previously. And stop deworming your horse. And everyone’s going to think you’re a nutcase. Tell them, Dr. Tucker is the nutcase who is telling you to do this. But give it a shot. One thing I wanted to mention, because I know that I myself have done a parasite cleanse, and I thought I felt better. Well, first I felt worse, and then I felt better. But here’s the thing. We do a parasite cleanse for us or for our horses because we think the bloating and the not feeling good. And the horses may be the poor hair coat is due to worms.

Renee (20:46)
And we give this dewormer stuff for ourselves. It’s typically wormwood and something else, such as garlic. I can’t remember the rest of them. But wormwood and on many of these other ones, plants that are in human dewormers are shown to absorb heavy metals. So we’re taking these, what we think are anti-parasite things, but all they’re really doing is picking up the heavy metals instead of the worms. And the worms then are like, Oh, well, we’re not needed, so we’ll go ahead and go out. So you might see them in the poop. So Now, I’m not quite certain of the mechanism of action of our horse dewormers. It’s kept quite secret. So we’ll just leave that for another day, someday, when I figure that out. But meanwhile, if you don’t deworm your horse, avoid all heavy metal toxicity type of things, then your ligaments will be strong. They will keep your joints nice and spacious. Therefore… Oh, by the way, when your joints are nice and spacious and open, your horse could just lie on the ground and do those beautiful squiggly rolls and just shift the sacrileac right back into place. They should be able to do that.

Renee (22:13)
Why not? Because of what I’ve already told you. Keep that in mind. Healthy ligaments, healthy liver, healthy joint spaces. Then you don’t need injections, you don’t need joint supplements. Pretty much what I’m trying to here with my podcast is talk myself out of a job. Because if we don’t do all the stuff we’re doing to horses, they’ll be fine. All right, I answered all the questions that might come up for sacroliag. I think that’s it. Hopefully, my dear imaginary friend Julia will understand this and start looking for the primary causes of sacrileac disease, which are, in summary, too small of joints from heavy metals affecting the ligaments, medial to lateral imbalance in the feet, and a misaligned pelvic symphasis. Those are your three ones that’s going to get 80 to 90% of sacrileic problems fixed just like that. All right, please let me know if you have any questions. You can always email support@tuckeriecoin. Com, and I’ll see you guys on the next time. A couple of questions in the live chat. Gelding who bunny hops at the cancer at liberty, but not under saddle. Oh, that’s very interesting. Definitely, if he’s bunny hopping at the canner at liberty, that’s a public synthesis problem.

Renee (23:40)
Nearly guaranteed. List all the things that might cause heavy metal build up, the buildup would be the inability of the horse to get rid of them, which would be too few parasites. There’s enough parasites, the liver can dump all the heavy metals right into the gut, and they’ll get absorbed, and the parasites will poop out. If you mean what’s causing heavy metals, it’s all of the toxic stuff. So that’s our life right now. So that is… Let’s see. Pesticides on the hay or even in the toxins and the chemicals that are in the feeds, there’s plenty of them. Just in regular bag feed, there’s chemicals. That’s Let’s see. Pesticides, fertilizers. There’s the chemtrails. We have vaccines. We have dewormers are toxic. Frankly, right now, sedation is getting toxic, too. I don’t know what they put in there. Just avoid the doctor. The old-school people, my great-grandpa was like, Never go to the hospital. I’m like, He’s right. All right, that may be a little bit exaggerated, but not much. Okay, and thank you guys for being here. I appreciate that. I’ll talk to next time. Bye-bye.

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