Q. What’s the best way to treat ringbone?

A. Ringbone is proliferation of bone around the pastern or coffin joint. It has often been classified as articular when the joint is involved, or nonarticular when it is outside the joint. It can, however, have both an articular and nonarticular component.

Ringbone can be a frustrating disease that is progressive, much like knee pain and back pain in people.

I don’t know that there’s an ultimate cure or prevention, if you will. My feeling is if we start treating some of these horses earlier when we have only slight to mild problems, we may be able to slow down the progression. Things like Surpass (a topical anti-inflammatory cream), shock wave therapy, treating the joint if the joint is actually involved—all of those things decrease inflammation and we have to assume will probably decrease the progression of the disease. Nobody has studied that specifically, but those would be the things, short-term, that I would probably do when a horse has a flare-up in that area