18/06/2025
You just have to read this… and if you scoff at it… come back and read it in another 10 years when it’s become self evident.
The BHM Team ❤️
One Man’s Theory, Millions of Horses: Rethinking Laminitis from the Ground Up
Chris Pollitt changed the world.
With a scalpel and a microscope, he gave us the gift of visibility. For the first time, we could see inside the equine hoof - not just in diagrams, but in microscopic detail.
Lamellar collapse, bone displacement, histological devastation. He showed us what he thought laminitis looked like from within.
And with that vision came his theory: that the pedal bone, P3, is suspended within the hoof capsule by the lamellae, and that under metabolic stress, this apparatus - the theory he coined the Suspensory Apparatus of the Distal Phalanx (SADP) - breaks down.
It was elegant. Measurable. Anatomically clear.
And it gave us something we desperately needed - a mechanism.
Suddenly, the mystery had a shape. A name. A pathology. We had a way to explain rotation and ‘sinking’. And the industry, already overwhelmed by laminitic cases and hungry for an answer, accepted it. Not as a theory, but as truth.
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- The Theory That Became the World -
Pollitt’s research soon became more than a reference - it became the foundation.
Veterinary schools wove the SADP model into their teaching. Laminitis became defined by what happened internally, not externally. It was a metabolic condition, a blood sugar issue, a hormonal spiral. And if the horse’s body failed, the foot would follow.
Farriery schools followed the same path. Structure was taught in angles and lever arms. Balance became something measurable on x-rays, but invisible to the eye. Correction replaced observation. Theory replaced the obvious blueprint.
And owners - well, they were told they’d done something wrong. That the pony was too fat, or too greedy, or genetically unlucky. That laminitis was just something that happened. Something that began inside. Something they couldn’t prevent - they could only fear.
We didn’t ask how the hoof had arrived at the internal rotation and collapse.
We didn’t look back a the history that brought it there.
We only looked in.
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- What We Didn’t See -
And so, we missed the obvious. Again and again.
We missed what was happening in the weeks and months and years leading up to the moment the horse went lame. We missed the trimming cycle. We removed the lamellar wedge. We missed the compromised sole, the increasingly high heels, the external story unfolding right beneath our hands.
The model we followed didn’t make room for that.
It told us laminitis was a sudden event, not a long goodbye.
We became so fixated on what was happening internally that we stopped seeing the hoof as a structure shaped by stimulus - if we ever believed stimulus was involved.
We never recognised that the hoof - including the papillae, the coronary band, the digital cushion - is not passive. These tissues are mechanosensitive. They respond to pressure, to terrain, to load. They grow in response to movement. They atrophy in its absence. They signal before they break.
The hoof has been trying to adapt to the hands that perverted it - the hoof tried to warn us, trying to adjust all along.
But because we never studied that part of the hoof, not really - we gave it a bit of lip-service but the internal collapse was where it was all at, wasn’t it?
The history, the living, environmental part - they aren’t really worth looking at - we kept on searching for causes that didn’t exist. We tried to solve mechanical failure with metabolic tools.
And we left balance - true balance - out of the conversation entirely.
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- My Story: What I Had to Unlearn -
For a long time, I believed what I was taught.
I believed that angles were truth, that diet separated laminae, that P3 told us all we needed to know.
I was told never to look at x-rays, that the hoof would respond if we just trimmed it to the hard sole. I couldn't recognise nor 'fix' compaction.
I did believe in breakover. I believed that if the science said it was right, it had to be helping. I believed that diet was causing the stretch that never seemed to go away. Or the footy horse on my books that never seemed to get sound for more than five minutes.
But… I believed I was helping.
And then, slowly, horses that were failing I really couldn’t help. Not all at once, and not in a dramatic way. It started quietly - a little tenderness, a little stiffness, a reluctance here or there. And yet, despite the “perfect” protocols, despite the careful diets and the bloodwork that came back just as expected, they kept getting worse.
Even the horses that were managed precisely, fed correctly, monitored obsessively - they too began to falter. There was no pattern, or rather, there was - just not one that matched the model I’d trusted.
The model wasn’t wrong - but I didn’t have the complete picture.
So I began to look again. I asked for x-rays - even though I struggled to read them - but I had to start somewhere.
I looked at the photos taken months before. That was one thing I was good at - keeping a history. I began to trace the shape of the hoof through time - its wear, its pressure, its imbalance. I studied videos, watched movement, studied terrain, reviewed trims, noticed what was missing.
And what I saw stopped me in my tracks. It was actually heart-breaking.
These horses weren’t failing from some sudden, internal catastrophe.
They were collapsing from the outside in.
They had been for years. But I had missed it.
I saw capsules that had been reshaped again and again by the best intentions - some of them my best intentions.
I saw walls that had been thinned and realigned and shortened into distortion. I saw soles that were compacted, infected, denied contact. I saw balance that had been replaced by symmetry, comfort replaced by correction, structure replaced by someone else’s idea of how a foot should look.
It wasn’t disease I was seeing.
It was consequence. It was shocking.
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- What Science Missed While Technology Moved On -
And all the while, technology moved forward. We gained more tools than ever before - from digital imaging and pressure mapping to histological staining and real-time biomechanics. The capacity to understand the hoof expanded exponentially.
But the old science didn’t follow.
It stayed with the model. It stayed where it was safe - focused on internal failure, on metabolic dysfunction, on the lamellae under collapse. We dissected pathology. We defined what broken looked like. But we never truly studied healing. Not in the field.
Not over time. Not in feet that were allowed to live.
Even Pollitt, for all his immense contribution, said as much when asked how laminitic feet recover. His answer was simple, but telling:
“Nobody’s ever done any studies on how this recovery occurs… because we always euthanise those cases.”
That was it.
If a horse lived, we stopped studying it.
Because you can’t dissect what walks away.
————
- What We See in Rehab - And Why It Matters -
But now, out here - far away from lecture theatres and closed journals - we are seeing it. Not in labs or angles, but in tracks, in paddocks, in timelines that stretch across months and years. In hooves that are telling their stories not in dissection, but in regeneration.
We are watching horses recover. Not with pharmaceuticals. Not with mechanical inventions or forced interventions. But with something far more ordinary - and far more powerful.
Balance.
Not the kind drawn in a textbook. The kind nature shaped. The kind that has been buried beneath distortion and misbelief, but still pulses quietly, waiting to be returned to.
We see it at places like Gawsworth Track Livery, where horses declared "unfixable" are finding their way back through careful trim, movement, environment and - crucially - the space and time to regrow without being forced into the old moulds again.
These are not perfect recoveries. They are not aesthetic. They are messy, bumpy, real. And they are happening.
But not every track, not everyone sees the whole picture. Even among the pioneers, many are still chasing aesthetics - still lifting heels to chase depth, still removing toe to improve breakover, still fearing nature’s own design, as if balance could only be achieved by manipulating it into place.
And that’s the heartbreak.
Because they are so close.
And yet still, some continue to trim the capsule without understanding the story inside it.
Still, the foot is interpreted through old models - just softened around the edges.
But the hoof will not be tricked. It either responds to balance - or it compensates for imbalance. And when it compensates for too long, it will eventually lose its battle and your horse will go from a bit footy to crippled seemingly overnight.
But instead of turning to the old paradigm, the old theory of the SADP, the old beliefs still clung to because they are more comforting that the reality - we start to document.
We are learning that now. And we are documenting it in full view.
————
- And So, What Now? -
We can no longer afford to pretend that this ‘laminitis’ begins inside the horse.
We’ve spent decades chasing insulin curves, managing feed charts, isolating triggers, waiting for laminitis to strike like lightning - unpredictable, inevitable, untouchable.
But we know better now.
Because when you follow enough feet backwards - before the moment of pain, before the vet visit and the x-ray, before the leaning back and fear and confinement - you see that it never began with a biochemical event.
It began with something far quieter. With a missed cue. A misunderstood extra bit of sole. A toe that was beginning to look a bit separated. A heel that kept climbing. It began with comfort that slowly turned into compensation, and compensation that turned into internal collapse.
But it started from the outside - and then went inwards.
It didn’t come from nowhere. It came from our hands. And the hoof, as it always does, responded.
We called it a disease.
We gave it a name.
We treated it as if it struck without warning, when in fact, we had created every condition it needed to thrive.
Laminitis was never a disease in the way we were taught. It was the consequence of years of imbalance - of reshaping nature’s design in our image, of forcing feet into ideals they never asked for, of confusing the appearance of symmetry with the function of health.
And the greatest tragedy of all?
That this misunderstanding was taught. Institutionalised. Defended.
————
- And One More Thing… -
I don’t know how to fix this.
This worldwide misbelief.
This chasing of a disease that never began on the inside, but was named and reframed and passed down as though it had.
I don’t know how to undo a system that convinced so many people - good people - that laminitis was something they caused by overfeeding, or not feeding, or not catching insulin in time.
I don’t know how to tell them that the truth is both more uncomfortable and more hopeful than that - that laminitis isn’t a disease at all, but the name we gave to a breakdown we never wanted to admit we created.
Because the real problem wasn’t grass. It wasn’t weight.
It was the hoof. The imbalance. The trimming. The reshaping.
The hands.
And how do you begin to say that - in a world where every farrier, every trimmer, every vet, every owner has likely had a horse with “laminitis” and P3 rotation on their books?
A horse they tried to help, and couldn’t? How do you say it when you know they were trained to cut away the separation, to shorten the toe to protect from that mythical DDFT pull, to raise the heel for support - never realising they were twisting the very capsule that kept P3 steady? Adding torque. Adding pressure. Adding pain.
And yet… what other path is there?
Do I think this realisation will be easy? No. I think the old laminitis will go down fighting, claws in the past, screaming and flailing as it collapses - and trying to take us with it.
But this is a numbers game now.
And the numbers are changing.
The more owners we teach to recognise balance… the more horses we rehab faster and more effectively… the more we refine our teaching, refine our guidance, build a new standard from the ground up… the more the world will turn. Not because we are louder. But because we are right.
That’s not arrogance - it is just an inevitability. Time will turn this around.
And yes, that will threaten revenue. It already does.
That’s not a threat - it’s just reality.
I don’t know how to calm the waters ahead. I feel them already, swelling. I feel the pushback building. I hear the footsteps of those who would try to silence us - to defend the system that let their horses down because it’s the only system they know.
And I understand that.
Because if you’ve never sat up at night reading every research paper you could find, or watched another rehab fail because it came to you too late, or told another owner through tears that you couldn’t help them anymore… then maybe you still believe laminitis is a thing to control, rather than prevent.
But I’ve seen what happens when control becomes a doctrine.
I’ve seen the flozins. The tenotomies. The rockers. The clogs. The heart bars. The endless tools used not to restore, but to intervene - over and over, digging deeper into a problem that began with the very belief that the hoof needed fixing in the first place.
And so I don’t know how to help the professionals who won’t let go.
I’ve tried. Most aren’t ready. Some may never be.
Because to accept that every laminitic horse you’ve worked on was made worse by your own hands - that’s more than confronting. That’s identity-shattering. And only you can choose whether to look at that or not.
I can’t make that choice for you.
But I can choose where to begin again.
From the ground up.
From owners. From students. From the grassroots. From the people who are asking - finally - why their horse’s bones rotated. Why their horse’s P3 penetrated. Why the last ten trims left their animal worse than before. Why the only answer offered was another shoe, another injection, another pill.
And I will keep answering them.
Because the only way out is through.
We are building a new world - not out of anger, but out of resolve. A world of hoof care professionals who face horrors every day, trimming hooves that have been imbalanced for years, and still show up. Still learn. Still listen. Still find the sole plane, one foot at a time. And with each one they balance, the old world shrinks a little further.
I can’t stop what’s coming. I can’t prevent the reckoning.
There may be lawsuits. There may be headlines.
All it takes is one lawyer with a daughter who lost her beloved pony to a system that refused to look at the hoof - and the house of cards falls.
But that’s not mine to control.
My work is here. With the horses still coming. With the owners still asking. With the truth that won’t go back in the box.
I will not build this new world on the fear of a disease that never existed.
I will build it on the blueprint that always did.
Not laminitis.
Balance.
Because maybe that won't ease the heartbreak of the horses I couldn’t save - the ones I let down because I didn’t know better.
Maybe it won’t erase the memories of the owners I had to tell, through clenched teeth and a breaking heart, that we were too late.
But it will stop the next one.
And the one after that.
And maybe - just maybe - that’s where healing begins.
Where this ends?
I don’t know.
But I do know this:
This is only the beginning.
Lindsay Setchell, BSc (Hons), PGCE, HMB Pro
