Horses for courses
Some of you may have read the paper in the Journal from a few years ago discussing the human athletes in professional horse racing and the risks they face in the course of their occupation.1
But the jockey is not the only athlete in this sport and for some folks the horse is a far more important determinant of pecuniary return. There are may parallels in equine sports medicine that make interesting reading for the human sports clinician. Horses it turns out get stress fractures, cruciate ligament injuries, as well as a whole raft of other musculoskeletal pathology. They even have their own alternative practitioners in addition to the sports veterinarians.
One critical area where equine science far outstrips human sports medicine is genetics. In part, this reflects the historical culture of the sport where selective breeding in racehorses has long been developed.
It turns out that more than one-third of the entire gene pool of the current thoroughbred horse population in the United Kingdom derives from just four horses imported from the Middle East and North Africa in the 17th Century. …
