What is your take on flexion test? I have a vet that swears by them and another vet who doesn't consider them to be definitive of an issue..  A horse can work sound, xray, ultrasound clean  but have crappy flexion test results.  My gelding is that horse lol.  

Depends on what joint you’re flexing. I see a lot of horses that are sore in Hocks and/or stifles that don’t flex positive, put the thermal camera on them and there’s an obvious heat signature. Seems like things in the front end show up a little easier. It also depends on the surface you’re doing the tests on. Trotting a U on blacktop shows a lot more than trotting straight away on dirt.

Bottom line, if your horse has a positive flexion, there’s something going on.

I have heard both sides of the argument. I just know that if you held one of my joints tight for that long I would limp the first few steps or have to shake my arm out also and a horse that is lame will limp in the "U" with or without the flexion (I have one). My vet does use the flexion, but she was telling me that there is a study out there where they did flexion on the brumbies in Australia (their feral horses) that had never been ridden and were fairly young and they all came up positive in a flexion. They also proved in the same study that all horses regardless of their use will have changes as many of the brumbies had changes showing in X-rays. I do think the flexion can point out stifle issues well. JMO - if a horse only steps out bad a couple steps in a flexion I don't put much weight on it, but if a horse kept on being off even slightly then I would have a vet do further testing.

In my opinion, flexions are just one piece of the WHOLE picture.

If you are having a performance issue and the flexions show soreness but diagnostic testing is clean (such as x-rays or ultrasound) then you may want to intervene with some sort of treatment because you DO have a performance issue.

However, its possible for a horse to have a performance issue, and flex perfectly fine, yet if you opt to dig deeper anyway with diagnostic testing then you can sometimes find the cause. I had a horse like this. Flexed absolutely fine but he kept taking his first barrel wide. Opted to xray the hocks and found lots of fusing changes that he did not let on during flexing!

And it's possible for a horse to have no performance issues, flex off, and then have good diagnotic texting. I've had this too. One of mine did have a small issue with his right front foot that had resolved 100% - yet he kept flexing "off" on that foot for a couple years until he finally kinda quit doing it. Performance was good and diagnostics were clean. He just (for whatever reason) didn't flex well on that foot.

So I think it is always important to treat flexions as just one piece of the puzzle, because that is what they are. But they can certainly be very valuable and very telling on what area of the body you should focus primary attention when suspecting an issue.

Good point.  He is working good.  I was going to lease him out so we were doing like a pre-lease exam. We xrayed, ultrasounded, did blocks.  I stopped at that because I've never had an indicator he had a problem.