Re: More from Dr. Cook (VERY LONG)

["Susan Garlinghouse" <suendavid@worldnet.att.net>]

OK, I'm getting more and more confused.  The original comments regarding Dr.
Strasser's methods led me to believe (perhaps mistakenly) that according to
her, simply being barefoot is enough to eliminate all kinds of health
problems.  Now reading a blurb from her book description, it sounds more
like it's an entire "natural" program of keeping horses outdoors, with free
choice feeds, etc and oh-by-the-way, also going barefoot to produce a
healthier horse.

Well, duh.  There's a big difference between
remove-those-shoes-and-those-enteroliths-will-dissolve-overnight and an
entire program of keeping horses out of box stalls, etc etc etc to decrease
incidence of colics and so on (though I agree with Kat, arranging for your
horse to be a pseudo-feral horse in So Cal is a good trick).

Then there are the claims about excess proteins from the hoof being a strain
on liver and kidney, which turns out to be from a guy that died 200 YEARS
AGO???  Are you kidding me?  Good God, no wonder the man hadn't read the
recent research.  When he was pondering kidney homeostasis, they weren't
even entirely sure what kidneys did, and considered demon possession a
viable explanation for colic.

Really, I'm sorry to sound really sarcastic, I don't mean it to be---I'm
just laughing hysterically over the whole thing.  Please don't anyone take
it personally, this is just turning into an Alice-down-the-rabbit-hole kind
of thing.

Last, I just couldn't let this pass:

> Nevertheless, this very paucity of comment actually tells us something
> important. Had her revolutionary findings been false, there is little
> doubt
> that one or more authors would by now have published a refutation. Yet no
> such
> publication has appeared. An inability to falsify a hypothesis constitutes
> powerful evidence in favor of its validity.


Totally untrue.  From what I've seen, Dr. Strasser hasn't been able to get
her studies accepted or published in the peer-reviewed journals.  Usually,
the reasons for denial are either poor methodology, a refusal to comply with
the journal's standards for publication (ie, limiting words within
constraints), overall hopeless quality of work, or the study and conclusions
were a "so what" study (ie, "we discovered that an igloo built in the Mojave
Desert in August will melt".)  The suggestion is that her inability to get
published is an insidious underground plot cooked up by close-minded vets
unwilling to accept new ideas.  Baloney.  I've published studies that
disagreed with accepted beliefs and had no trouble getting it accepted.  You
will definitely run a gauntlet of questions to defend your conclusions, but
if the science is there, it'll be gleefully accepted, believe me.

Nor is the comment that if there's no research to disprove her theories,
then they must be true.  Using that logic, then because I have found no
studies to specifically disprove it, then my statement that I am the Grand
Duchess Anastasia must be true.  Research don't always work that way, and
the comment that a paucity of disproving studies supports her theories is
ridiculous.

Well, anyway, I can't WAIT to read the theories form the horse's mouth, so
I've ordered the books.  We'll see.

Susan G