Dr Stuart Vallance is a specialist equine surgeon who trained in America at UC Davis and has been back in Melbourne working racetrack practice and doing racehorse surgeries since 2011.
“My experience with Arthramid Vet started as probably one of the first people in Australia to use it. I’ve been using it for about 10 years and we’ve learned a lot about it during that time. A lot about timing, case selection and how effective it is.”
“I use Arthramid over other alternatives because it reduces our reliance on corticosteroids and it works.”
“The key thing is to think about it differently than cortisone. We’re so used to using Cortisone and having an instant effect in sort of three, five, seven, days and then that effect wears off over time. Whereas with Arthramid, it’s more of a longer range approach and you should use it earlier in a horse’s preparation or when the horse is not in full intensity training. That’s where we see it working best.”
“Other tips to injecting Arthramid Vet is to know that it’s a very thick viscous product. You struggle if you transfer it into other syringes it’s very hard to inject through a large bore syringe. And if you’re in a larger bore syringe it won’t go through a smaller needle very well, we learned that the hard way. However, if you’re just using the little lock syringe it comes with it tends to go in quite easily.
“For vets who have never used it before I just say, give it a go key thing is not to be worried about complications. I think it’s quite a safe product.”
“I think the great thing about Arthramid is they’re actually doing some good research and they’ve done research up against sort of a gold standard treatment of triamcinolone HA and in those studies it was it’s got some quite favorable long-term effects. A lot of a lot of other treatments just don’t have that research. I recommend Arthramid.”