Dandi had been lame on and off for 3 years. He was over 30 years old, but his exact age was unknown (at least to me). I was called in on this case at the suggestion of the farrier who was working at the barn where Dandi was stabled, near Pearl City, Ill.

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.

Because of the biomechanical forces imposed on the digits of horses with laminitis, there is no uniformly successful method of foot management and shoeing.