Mid-South Equine Sports Medicine & Surgery
in Tioga, Texas
Mid-South Equine Sports Medicine & Surgery
in Tioga, Texas
Mid-South Equine Sports Medicine & Surgery provides equine sports medicine, lameness evaluation, and equine surgery for performance horses across North Texas and DFW. We are the only clinic within two hours of Tioga offering standing MRI, traditional MRI, and equine bone scan. Our services include diagnostic imaging, orthopedic and arthroscopic surgery with a board-certified surgeon, regenerative therapy, rehabilitation, gastroscopy, in-house laboratory, pre-purchase exams, and reproduction.
Performance Horse Show Veterinarian | On-Site Care | Mid-South Equine
Lameness Evaluations
Equine Lameness Evaluation
Diagnostic Workups for Performance Horses | Tioga, Texas
When a performance horse stops being right, the answer is rarely obvious.
It shows up as a dropped shoulder in the lope. A refusal to take a lead. A horse that warms out of it in ten minutes. A score that's slipped half a point and nobody can say why. Sometimes there's no lameness at all — just a horse that's quit trying.
Our job is to turn that into a diagnosis, using data rather than guesswork.
Examination
We start with your observations and your trainer's. When did it start? What changed — shoeing, footing, workload, a new saddle? Is it worse on a circle, on hard ground, after a hard weekend, or first thing in the morning? Does it improve with work or get worse?
Then a full static exam: palpation, joint flexion, hoof testers, back and neck evaluation, limb symmetry, and hoof balance assessment.
Dynamic Gait Evaluation
Your horse is evaluated in motion — walk, trot, and lope; straight lines and circles in both directions; hard footing and soft. Under saddle when the problem only expresses itself under work, which is common in western performance horses.
Flexion tests help localize the region and grade the response. We're looking for asymmetry, shortened stride, reluctance to turn, and the compensatory patterns that develop when a horse has been protecting something for months.
Diagnostic Nerve and Joint Blocks
This is the step that separates a diagnosis from a guess.
Local anesthetic is placed systematically, starting at the bottom of the limb and working upward. When the lameness improves after a specific block, we've isolated the anatomic region responsible.
Blocking takes time — each one requires a waiting period before re-evaluation — and it can't be rushed. But without it, imaging becomes a fishing expedition. Plenty of horses have been treated for a hock problem that blocked to the foot.
Advanced Imaging
Once the region is localized, we image it. The tissue we're looking for determines the modality:
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Radiography for bone — arthritic change, fragments, navicular changes
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Ultrasound for tendons, ligaments, and joint structures
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Standing MRI for soft tissue inside the hoof capsule that nothing else can see
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Bone scan when the lameness won't localize or involves the pelvis or spine
All four are on-site. If radiographs come back clean on a foot that blocked sound, we can go to MRI the same day rather than scheduling you back in three weeks.
Conditions We Diagnose
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Navicular syndrome and caudal heel pain
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Suspensory ligament desmitis, front and hind
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Superficial and deep digital flexor tendon injuries
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Osteoarthritis of the coffin, pastern, fetlock, hock, and stifle
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Sacroiliac and lumbar pain
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Kissing spines and impinging dorsal spinous processes
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Bone bruising and stress remodeling
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Subchondral bone cysts and OCD lesions
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Cervical facet disease and neck arthritis
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Poor performance without an identifiable lameness
Objective Gait Analysis — Lameness Locator
The human eye is good but not perfect, and it struggles most with the cases that matter: mild lameness, bilateral lameness, and horses that are equally off on both sides so nothing looks asymmetric
.Lameness Locator uses body-mounted inertial sensors to measure head and pelvic movement at a sampling rate far beyond visual detection, producing objective numerical data on which limb is affected, how severely, and at what phase of the stride.
It's especially useful for documenting response to diagnostic blocks — showing measurable improvement rather than relying on a subjective read — and for tracking a horse's progress through rehabilitation against its own baseline numbers.
Also worth adding to the pre-purchase page. Objective data on a horse you're about to spend real money on is exactly what a buyer wants, and it's a differentiator most sellers' vets can't offer.