Epm????

if money is an issue and youre not 100% sure if its EPM, you may want to have a vet drench your horse with Baycox first. we use baycox to help with our EPM horses. we drench with baycox about once a month. and if your horse has to have any injections or such, do NOT use ANYTHING with cortizone. cortizone is a HUGE no no with EPM horses.

anyway the baycox is a lot cheaper and does work

Baycox is not an approved treatment and there are no good studies on the dosage or time that would be necessary to effect actual treatment of the diseae. Baycox is the parent drug of Marquis and the body turns it into the same product, however I haven't seen any good evidence of what dose would be necessary to affect the same results as with Marquis.

You would need to discuss payment options with your vet or look for one of the online pharmacies that will sell marquis by the tube so that you can spread the payments out a bit. But really most equine vets simply can't afford to take payments because they have bills to pay themselves.

As for why I would recommend using the lab at UCDavis, it is because they run the IFAT test which gives a quantitative answer that has been correlated through studies to a % chance that the horse actually has EPM rather than just being exposed to the parasite. It isn't foolproof, but it is better than a simple "yes he has been exposed" or "no he hasn't been exposed" that you get from the Western Blot test which really leaves you little better off in a positive horse. This is because exposure only leads to active disease in about 1% of exposed horses.

actually there was a test done by bayer. nothing in it says marquis is any better than baycox. its just much more expencive

The problem is that Baycox doesn't work but that we don't have reliable dosing and safety studies with Baycox.

all im going to say is thats what the vets use here, and there has never been a problem. and ive seen first hand improvement.

Yes, but how accurate was the diagnosis? EPM is very over-diagnosed. Many times the cause is another condition and the horse improves due to time off, anti-inflammatories and/or it's body fighting off the infectious organism. I've seen multiple horses that were diagnosed with EPM that turned out to be something else. Several of them even seemed to respond to treatment for EPM because treatment and time off were instituted at the same time.

Dr. Bruce Kilmer of Bayercorp explained that bolus dosing of Baycox isn't going to be effective because you do not reach a steady state of drug in the central nervous system and that steady state of drug is required to actually effectively treat EPM. Thus the need for 28 day dosing with Marquis.

Ok, so last night my horse Sassy colicked and I got a tube of banamine (paste) from the vet. I am in central Oklahoma, and we buy our hay from folks in the state nearby. I really doubt its selenium deficiency. We have made payments with our vet before.
When the vet came out, we tried several things. He is very uncordinated, has no muscle mass on his shoulders (you can feel the whole bone), is weak, and his back is kind sore. We have tried everything imaginable with this horse. We are not 100% sure if it is EPM, but we are getting his blood tested for other things.

Ok so Rebel is indeed borderline EPM. We are getting a shipment soon of medice (the vet choose something else, not Marquis, and alot cheaper). Thank you guys for all your answers!

let me know what the stuff is he ordered. im interested to know.

Exactly what does "borderline EPM" mean? You should ask your vet if that is what he said, because that makes no sense. If they did a Western Blot on blood there is simply a "yes" or no" to exposure. If they did an IFAT then the results are reported with a % chance that you are dealing with active disease.