Wow, I found this article because I just recently had the EXACT same issue in my own horse!

I haven’t been able to find any other instances of bilateral fractures. Your description of almost everything about your horse sounds idential to mine. Do you have any clue as to why? My horse was a breeding stallion and started covering mares as a long yearling. Makes me wonder if they were stress fractures of the growth plates of the coxae? He is 17 now. Really struggles with circles, deep footing or hills. He has quite extreme overdevelopment of his glutes which made discovering the floating “lumps” above his coxae harder to palpate initially. I have had him for 4 years and hes always been intermittently stiff behind, always struggles with the outside hind on a circle, some SI pain, and issues in front legs due to being chronically overloaded. The discovery explains a lot, but also leaves a lot of new questions!

Thank you for sharing your story. I’m sure that scenarios such as this mystery lameness are so much more common than recognized.

Another factor is that with these diagonal effects, it’s often hard to assess which direction the issue is travelling, and therefore source of the primary problem.

When the horse has an old tuber coxae injury and is affected by a fresh event elsewhere in the body, the compromised musculature becomes a renewed issue. I found a lot of pain in this area yesterday with a regular client who was presenting lame in the diagonal forelimb…

Thank you for this feedback!

Thank you for the feedback 🙂 I did take videos, but the results are more likely to mislead than to inform. Why? Because each horse is individual, in that they’ve other things going on too.

The best thing to do is palpate for the differences in the tuber coxae, identify a fracture (if there is one), and then take a good look at what’s happening with that particular horse – bearing in mind its other potential issues.

The most common change I’ve seen is the outward turn of the foot and leg, with medial placement of the foot in walk. Trot tends to obscure rather than expose these changes, as they’re not lamenesses and the elevation afforded in trot makes movement easier.

And thank YOU for this comment – I’m humbled that my writing has helped. I often question the wisdom of maintaining a blog that costs me to run, then something like this reminds me that it’s doing good out there.