Farriers beware. Avoid diagnosing a horse with navicular disease, a problem that even experienced equine veterinarians using high-technology cannot always determine with absolute certainty.

When the duo of Burney Chapman and George Platt popularized the use of heart bar shoes for foundered and laminitic horses in the late 1960s, it set off a firestorm of innovations and design-styles for therapeutic horseshoes that reinvigorated the hoof-care industry.

Sooner or later, every farrier or equine veterinarian is going to run into laminitis.

After roughly two decades of use on humans, magnetic resonance imaging, or MRI for short, is becoming practical for equine medical care.