Any horse person will tell you that most horse people are game to try many different kinds of therapeutic treatments for their horses. I’ve posted here before about chiropractic treatment. I’ve also explored acupuncture. Most recently I had Coco treated with PEMF, which is short for Pulsed Electromagnetic Field therapy. I’m not going to go into great detail about what it is and how it works, but generally it uses energy waves (pulsed) to treat damaged cells. The barn I show with uses it extensively and has had great luck using PEMF therapy. I live four hours away from my show barn, so to get my horses regular treatment I needed to find someone closer to me.

I finally found someone who works out of the Canton area and comes to my region somewhat regularly. Heather is fantastic to work with! She is extremely knowledgeable and is patient and calm with the horses.

I’ve posted on here myriad times about Coco’s various symptoms and ailments, none of which are debilitating, but I’ve always felt like she has something internal that just isn’t quite right. Horses are hard because they can’t tell us where something hurts or how much with words, only with body language. Coco is much better under saddle the past couple months, but she still seems agitated when I brush her barrel on her left side and still sometimes shows signs of discomfort when I first start riding.

Heather did a full examination of her prior to treatment and we agreed that a full-body therapy would be best. She was somewhat reactive to testing for signs of ulcers and for her female anatomy. She’s been treated for ulcers twice, and to be honest I never thought her behaviour changed after treatment, which led me to believe she didn’t have ulcers, or at least not bad enough that that was what was causing her reactivity.

Starting with her noggin, the flexible tubes emit a pulse. The pulse can be set to be really aggressive or very slight. We, of course, started very slightly on her poll and around her head. You can tell that she relaxed into it pretty well.

A horse’s poll (the area behind their ears) is more or less connected to their whole body, so anything out of whack here affects myriad other parts of their body. Her poll was somewhat reactive to the pulse, but not bad. So her body was telling us that she was a bit out of sorts here, but not to an extent that was worrisome.

This is another part of the horse’s anatomy that connects to many other parts. It is near the entrance to the thoracic cavity.

Coco mostly nonplussed at the therapy to the front half of her body. Her body showed a little reactivity at the poll and near the entrance to the thoracic cavity (which is also where ulcer pain would be manifested). She was mostly relaxed and Heather was able to turn up the pulsing a bit for these parts.

The back part of her anatomy was a bit of a different story. In this video you can hear the clicking sound the pulsing makes and see her body’s reaction to the pulse. This was where her body had the strongest reaction to the PEMF. There are any number of reasons her body was reactionary at this location. Perhaps due to trauma from her fetotomy. Her internal conformation may be causing some discomfort. She may have some intestinal parasites that don’t show up on fecal exams and are causing her discomfort. Heather did some additional examination that led us to believe the parasite issue might have some veracity as well as trauma from the fetotomy.

The part that seems to be the most distressed.

Based on her therapy and the examination done by Heather I have opted to treat Coco with a Panacur PowerPac followed by a short worming regimen to hopefully get rid of any internal parasites that might be making her uncomfortable. After that we will try to get some more regular PEMF therapy and see what we have. All in all Coco has been doing really well lately. Our rides are good. She seems happy and mostly comfortable. Definitely better than she seemed to be last fall!

Have you done PEMF for you or your horse? Any other therapeutic/non-traditional treatments? I’m curious to hear about your experiences!