Rehabilitation

One of the most important components of our package of total horse health care and sports medicine is to get you as an owner, rider, or trainer involved in the rehabilitation of your horse.

After initial diagnosis and treatment, it is nearly impossible for an owner to know how to bring the horse back to work without damaging the injured structure again.

At first, at the Center, we try to understand why the horse got injured in the first place. Most sports related injuries are repetitive stress injuries. Not a major trauma caused major injury (like a fracture or a degloving injury), but overload of a specific structure (mostly a ligament or tendon) over time has damaged the structure so much that a chronic disability has occurred.

When you do not change the living environment and the work load, you do not change the initial circumstances that caused the injury, and after treatment the horse will suffer from the same injury very soon.

At the Center we will give you an idea about how your horse got injured in the first place, and how to avoid that in the future.

With a rehabilitation plan we will help you in the design of a training program that will reinstitute the injured structure as well as enforce adjacent structures to maximal support.

When a tendon got injured, we can design a rehab/training program that will make the muscles stronger that support the tendon, so the tendon has less loading in the future.

Rehabilitation is not a quick process, nor a standard process for each individual case.

We will get you as a horse owner, trainer of rider involved in the process of rehabilitation, so costs are manageable and the work can be done in the barn or arena.

The background of Dr van Wessum as a FEI dressage rider, trainer and judge assist him in designing a rehabilitation program focused on basic dressage exercises that will make certain muscle groups stronger. He can design a specific program for each case.

Rehabilitation often needs several phases in which the workload and the functionality of the injured structure will be gradually increased. In most cases we will see a patient several times during this rehabilitation program, evaluate it’s condition and add another phase with new exercises to the program, until the horse is back in work at it’s original level.

When you may encounter problems in the rehabilitation process of your horse that will limit your ability to do the rehab yourself, we can refer you to a specific rehab center of training barn.

We work close together with the trainers of European Connection in Fenton; www.ec-dressage.com.