Why Gastroscope your horse versus just treating?

Why do we need to perform a gastroscope rather than just treat for stomach ulcers in horses?

Why gastroscope? 

Well we often get asked why bother my horse is showing all the signs of ulcers? Well a simple answer is we need to know what we are treating.

Some horses will have very serious symptoms and little changes seen in the stomach. Others as we all know are very stoic and show extreme symptoms. So for this reason we need to know what we are dealing with. Equally a lot of our patients are showing signs of pyloric or glandular disease rather than squamous disease. These can be very difficult to treat. 

All these horses seen here show a lot of symptoms but all had variable ulcers. 

Also as despite what we all used to think not every horse responds as well as we think to treatment. We might see an improvement in clinical in signs but no change in the ulcers. Unfortunately we have seen each of the treatments not work on some horses. So the follow up scope is so important to know how things are going.