Have you ever had a problem with your horse and tried to research it?

Haha! What a joke, right?

There’s SO much information out there, especially if you ask everyone in the barn, and don’t forget all the horse groups on facebook!

In this Horse Mysteries Solved podcast, I share how some horse therapists make this overload worse instead of better… and how therapists can stop (it can be hard to do!)

How can horse owners not be overwhelmed?

Just learn or change one thing per week. That’s it.

Too many changes is counterproductive, just like too much information.

 
Links Mentioned:
–https://www.tuckerbiokinetic.com/opt-in-50-secrets/
 
 
 

Summary:
Summary by AI:
Dr. Renee Tucker discusses the issue of information overload for both horse owners and therapists. She shares examples of overwhelmed horse owners who have researched extensively online, leading to confusion and frustration. Tucker emphasizes the importance of not overwhelming clients with too much information and advises therapists to focus on addressing one or two issues at a time. She recounts a case where she helped a distressed horse owner by recommending a peppermint tea trial to check for ulcers and advised removing corn oil from the horse’s diet. Tucker encourages horse owners to implement changes gradually and to focus on learning one thing per week. She also offers free emails with horse care tips on her website.

Transcript:

Renee Tucker (00:01)
Hello there. My friends, Dr. Renee Tucker here chatting with you again today. I wanted to talk about information overload. So for horse owners, how to try and not be paralyzed by information, and for horse therapists, how to not overwhelm your clients with information, I thought, should I really do this podcast?

Renee Tucker (00:25)
Because this is confusing, too obvious, too boring. But I thought, well, you know what? If it helps one person, then it’s worth doing. So there you go. That’s why we’re going to carry on.

Renee Tucker (00:39)
So I got a good example for you. Okay. Because here’s the thing. As a veterinarian who does holistic alternative stuff, obviously energy body work is pretty alternative still. Well, I see a lot of new people who are getting an open mind and thinking about alternative, therapies holistic treatments, that type of thing.

Renee Tucker (01:00)
I see them a lot because usually they’ve used up all the traditional medicine alternatives. They’ve done everything they can. They’ve done all the X rays. I’ve seen plenty of people done all the MRIs. They’ve done every trainer.

Renee Tucker (01:14)
They know they’ve done every shoeing. They know they’ve done everything. And it’s not working. They still have a problem. So a lot of times that’s when I see people, when they’re just done and can’t do anything else.

Renee Tucker (01:27)
And then what usually happens is they research on the Internet and ask all their friends and everybody on Facebook and everywhere else, and they have so much information, they have so many opinions. And they’re not just casual opinions. Right? Everyone’s like, no, you got to do this. So it’s not any fun to have a horse with a little problem even or a big one.

Renee Tucker (01:52)
And you can’t figure it out because everyone has a different opinion. It’s extremely frustrating. I have this one client who said she just wanted to research barefoot for her horse. And she said, I went online and there was so much information about Polish shoes. Don’t pull his shoes right away.

Renee Tucker (02:11)
Get an Xray. Don’t get an Xray. And all these different barefoot trimming philosophies and theories and then all the barefoot boots. And then it was so overwhelming to her guys, she just gave up. She’s like, just can’t deal.

Renee Tucker (02:27)
I just have too much going on with my business. And I just thought, this shouldn’t be that hard. And she’s right about that. But unfortunately, there is a learning curve to everything. So let me tell you this example of this horse I saw a while back, and we’ll call her lady. Ladies owner is one of these people who had done everything traditional already.

Renee Tucker (02:54)
Not everything, but a lot of it. And it wasn’t working. And her horse was getting worse. So here’s a horse, lady, sweet horse. Well, the kind of horse, you know, that she wants to be sweet.

Renee Tucker (03:07)
Okay, sorry.

Renee Tucker (03:12)
She was like a mix, kind of like a third quarter horse type of mix. And then just a Bay horse. Not just sorry, I love bays Bay horse, kind of a mixed horse. Wanted to be sleep, but man, if you touched her, she was not happy. She didn’t like to be touched at all.

Renee Tucker (03:32)
And the owner said she doesn’t like grooming. She doesn’t like to be touched. She’s tried a whole bunch of different brushes. It doesn’t matter. She said she’s definitely more sensitive to touching after she rides her.

Renee Tucker (03:45)
Let’s see what else. She was having trouble putting weight on her. And so she just been giving her basically kind of a lot of grain because she had heard that there are a lot of grain and top dressing it with corn oil to try to get good fats in her. This is her words while I’m standing there kind of listening and watching the horses kind of standing with the head and neck more upright than it should. I mean, we’re just hanging out by the cross ties.

Renee Tucker (04:15)
Not a lot going on, but the horse is just upright and very eyes open and weary. And I’m not really close to her. I’m over by the owner. So a good six to 8ft away. She’s still very nervous about what I’m going to do or might do.

Renee Tucker (04:30)
Let’s see. I noticed that while she’s standing there and she had shoes on all 4ft, and then she had under run heels and contracted heels. And yes, I could tell this from 6ft away. And she would occasionally put one front foot forward of the other one. And then she’d switched it.

Renee Tucker (04:51)
So that’s where the owner was telling me about a problem. I was like, hey, did you notice that she puts one foot forward and back? Oh, my gosh, yes, I’ve seen that. Then I looked online about that, and then she probably has the regular too. The owner was worried about so many things and had overwhelmed herself with all this information.

Renee Tucker (05:08)
She was nearly in tears, and I just feel so bad for her. She’s doing her very best. And there’s just so much information, and it’s just literally overwhelming and can paralyze people, and you don’t know where to start. It’s just awful, really.

Renee Tucker (05:27)
So that’s the situation I was in. I’m trying to just chill the owner down, because honestly, the horse already knows that they have pain, but the owner is stressing out. I know it’s hard to not stress out when you’re worried about your horse, but they notice your emotions. So stressing out, freaking out, all this kind of stuff you kind of want if you can take a deep breath and really, it’s going to be okay. We’re just going to do one thing at a time.

Renee Tucker (05:57)
Okay? Now, I like to speak to horse therapist for a minute, because you’re all wonderful, super wonderful. But I do know that sometimes therapists can overwhelm horse owners who are already overwhelmed with all their information. And that’s because as therapists, we just see stuff, and we want to tell people to help them. But that can just be too much.

Renee Tucker (06:26)
So I have a friend and she’s let me go with colleagues and she is just not really good at this. Let’s put it that way. She would come up to a Porsche like this and say oh my gosh, what’s going on here? This is horrible. Look at your horse.

Renee Tucker (06:45)
She’s probably had ulcers and you haven’t treated for ulcers yet. Look at her feet. My gosh, did you do her feet yourself? This is horrible. And oh my gosh, I can’t even believe she’s not dead.

Renee Tucker (06:56)
She’s so horrible and people would just blurt out crying. I mean just aghast at this treatment and I don’t know what actually is wrong with her with a colleague of mine and I tried to talk to her about this. It’s not really going well. So anyways, if you have somebody like that, honestly I don’t care how much they know, if they make you feel like crap, just fire them. That’s just silly.

Renee Tucker (07:24)
So what I said and what I’d like to encourage therapists to do is just give the first one or two issues that should be dealt with and say and there’s some other things and we’re going to deal with those as we go along. Okay? So what I said to the owner approximately was okay, I see we have a lot of issues here. That’s no problem. We can get all of them fixed and you can just see the client then start to relax.

Renee Tucker (07:56)
She doesn’t quite believe me yet. But the fact that I am willing to say we are going to get them fixed means I’m going to help her get a plan and follow through with the plan with her. So now she’s like okay, someone is helping me. Finally I found help cause the internet ain’t helping. Asking all the friends isn’t helping, she just needs a plan and someone to walk through it with her.

Renee Tucker (08:21)
Okay, so then I would say okay for lady, the horse, we are going to get her out of pain first the most of her pain so that she can start calming down and thinking and you don’t have to worry so much about her. So the first thing we want to do is check for ulcers. And of course this lady at the time, I can’t afford it. Scoping. Okay, okay.

Renee Tucker (08:46)
We don’t have to do a scope. In fact Scoping doesn’t get to the Hind gut. So you don’t necessarily need to do a scope unless you want to. It’s like okay, I told her about the peppermint tea trial where you just give peppermint tea like literally human peppermint tea and the tea bags and you give one teabag per day. You don’t Cook it.

Renee Tucker (09:10)
You cut open the tea bag and pour it in whatever food they got and twice a day for two weeks. It’s a peppermint tea trial. If the horse calms down on peppermint tea and has a softer eye and is not doing some of these painful related behaviors, then that’s a good sign that ulcers are involved. And then you go from there. So you haven’t spent thousands of dollars trying to figure this out and treating stuff.

Renee Tucker (09:38)
And if it’s not there, peppermint tea is pretty cheap. So I told this lady’s owner, okay, so we’re going to do a peppermint tea trial, and I would like you to stop giving the corn oil because corn oil. And by the way, guys, soy, anything with soy or corn is genetically modified, at least here in the United States. So just genetically modified products cause ulcers, period. You don’t have to agree with me.

Renee Tucker (10:06)
This is just my opinion and my experience. But I would suggest, as I suggested to this lady, to take her off the corn oil and anything with soy in it, unless perhaps it’s organic. But I didn’t want to overwhelm with that. I said, just take her off the corn oil and do this peppermint tea trial. That’s it.

Renee Tucker (10:27)
And she was like, okay, I’ve got peppermint tea at home or I can go to the grocery store. I can do this twice a day. I’m like, yes, twice a day. Can you do twice a day? Yes, I can do twice a day.

Renee Tucker (10:37)
She’s so cute. She’s trying so hard. Anyways, that was it. I said, we’re going to do those two things. And then what I’d like you to do is call me in a week and tell me how it’s going.

Renee Tucker (10:48)
And then we’ll go from there. We’re probably going to have to deal with some salt issues and some perhaps vitamin, mineral imbalances, and perhaps some navicular and sewing changes. But we can do all that as we go along. Okay? So rather than overwhelming your clients with all the 15,000 things that you know to fix on the horse, just do one or two at a time.

Renee Tucker (11:12)
Now, this will, of course, vary depending on the person. If you have a person who’s very optimistic or they have lots of questions or lots of experience and they want to do more, that’s fine. You have more info. But these people are already stressed out. And frankly, even people don’t act like they’re stressed out but are really good at faking it.

Renee Tucker (11:33)
Guys, just give people one or two things to do and then do your body work or whatever therapy you do and see how it goes. Okay? I would love it if therapists would stop overwhelming people and making them cry. I’ve seen it too many times, and that’s why I’m making this podcast. Okay, I think that’s it.

Renee Tucker (11:56)
So if you’re a horse owner, definitely just change one thing per week. Just one not everything you read on the Internet overnight. Okay? Just change one thing. Then you know it’s working, and then it’s not overwhelming to you or your horse.

Renee Tucker (12:11)
And then just try to learn one thing per week. I know it’s sometimes tempting when we have a problem to gulp down all the information and sometimes you’ve got to do that if there’s some real problem at the moment. But if you can just try to learn something new every week, that’s what it’s about. It’s a journey. If I may suggest, I do have free emails, 50 horse secrets that your horse doesn’t know and you can find that Tucker biokinetic.com and other than that, we’ll give you some emails.

Renee Tucker (12:45)
They’re very short a couple of paragraphs and they either just tell you something or give you a little exercise to do. Just to learn a little something easy every week. That’s all for now. I will talk to you guys later. Bye.