Hip joint palpation caused the needless death of thousands of 8 and 10 week old puppies before breeders lost enthusiasm and vets gave up on its value as an early warning of hip problems.
Palpation was so inaccurate that many vets insisted on repeated examinations... That defies logic but it was the protocol of the time. Palpation finally earned tactful condemnation in 1999 (2) but it took over 20 years! Palpation and the OFA x-ray procedure was characterized by Dr. Jerry Schnelle (who first identified and studied canine hip dysplasia) as “pinning the tail on the donkey.”
If Preliminary Certification Looked Uncertain...Breeders were encouraged to have a pectinectomy performed. The surgical procedure involved cutting the tendons of the (groin) pectineus muscle, and since it failed to help dogs attain hip certification and did not relieve pain nor prevent further degeneration, the painful, expensive procedure had a relatively short life. It was promoted as relieving tension on the hip joint and even represented as a “cure” for hip dysplasia. Thankfully, the popularity of the procedure waned although some vets still perform the useless but expensive surgery.
OFA Certified?The Orthopedic Foundation For Animals was formed to certify dogs as being free of hip dysplasia and to identify dogs with early hip problems. Like fulcrum x-ray and palpation, it was validated only by those who greatly profited from the procedure. The "Swedish Study" was cited by OFA... When PennHip was launched by the U of PA, OFA began to stagger like a crippled dog until the American Kennel Club saved it by listing the OFA number on the dog’s AKC registration certification.
OFA contributed significantly to the AKC Canine Health Foundation (AKC/CHF) and they now work together on many canine health projects.
The OFA website makes no mention of founding or even current board members. Go figure! After decades of debacle, Dr. Corley finally retired and I am proud to claim some degree of credit for that.
I went nose-to-nose with Dr. Corley many times but the result was progress so I count it a worthwhile 28 year battle. Writing for the Canine Chronicle and other top dog magazines such as Kennel Review, I repeatedly asked why hip sockets were so important but elbow, patella, and stifle joints were not? It took over 20 years of badgering on that lack of logic before OFA caved in to my public charges of hypocrisy and fraud and finally began to certify knees and elbows.
Dr. Corley was replaced by the “Beagle Man” Eddie Dziuk who is a true dog man with the dog’s best interest at heart. By the turn of the century, OFA also began to issue certificates for heart, skin, thyroid, deafness, and a smorgasbord of genetic and DNA tests and certifications.
Will The Real Dog Please Bark Up?
If we can’t trust the basis of health testing, how do we know how definitive a test really is? No objective third-party “certifies” that eye, heart, kidney, hearing exams, or x-rays are accurate. Many dogs become clinically affected after certification. Was it a faulty exam, a records mix-up, or testing based on a faulty premise? Most health certifications depend on the interpretive skills of the veterinarian conducting the exam or the vet who evaluates the results. Even in human medicine, mistakes and misdiagnoses occur.
Dr. Corley (OFA) claimed all sorts of in-house statistics unsupported by independent research. Until we have solid statistical data to back up rhetoric, and until we can be assured that a test is definitive and not interpretive, we can only regard health certifications as a professional but personal opinion, not a scientific fact.
Health certifications should be duly noted and weighed as just one factor relating to overall health, temperament, and quality when breeding decisions are made.
Please, breeders, forget bragging rights and be realistic. Canine health has reached a crisis point. A healthy heart in an obsessive-compulsive spinner is of little comfort to owner or the dog. Excellent hips on a dog with chronic debilitating gastritis is of no genetic value. The best breeders want valid answers even if they are disappointing. We are honest with ourselves and the health certification organizations must be honest with us!
(1) “Palpation has shown diagnostic use in human neonates, but is controversial and may have little diagnostic or prognostic utility in the dog. A caution: In human infants, it has been suggested that repetitive Barlow tests, and presumably Ortolani and Bardens as well, are capable of making infant hips unstable, thus giving a false-positive result. Vet Clinics No Am Sm Anim Prac, Vol 2, No. 3, pp., 554-557, 1992.
(2) “Results of hip joint palpation were at best moderately correlated with radiographic measures of hip joint laxity.” Am Vet Med Assoc. 1999 Feb 15;214(4):497-501
Click if you missed Canine Health Certification, Part 1 Excerpts from "On The Line" ShowSight Magazine Oct 2001 #01101508168r9 http://www.thedogplace.org/GENETICS/Health-Certification2-0101_Andrews.asp
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Some
breeds that have "glow in the dark" dogs. Those poor irradiated-to-death
dogs are substituted for dogs with known problems, enabling defective dogs to
obtain health certifications. So it is that nothing has changed except the emergence of new canine health
problems for which there are new tests, many of them without regard to
environmental factors.
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