“You Aren’t a Vet.” So What Makes Me Qualified to Talk About Equine Therapy Equipment?

“But you aren’t a vet.”

Correct 😂

I am not a veterinarian, and I have never claimed to be one.

If my horse is lame, colicking, injured, or neurologic, I call my veterinarian. Full stop.

But there is another question that comes up constantly when I talk about PEMF machines, red light products, lasers, static magnets, shockwave, TECAR, and other therapy equipment:

What makes you qualified to explain how these machines actually work?

That is where my day job becomes extremely relevant.

I am a nuclear criticality engineer

I work in nuclear fuel manufacturing and specialize in criticality safety. My job is essentially to make sure radioactive material stays safely subcritical during manufacturing, handling, storage, and processing.

My normal work is not “memorize a brochure and repeat what the manufacturer says.” I take a physical system apart intellectually and ask:

• What is the actual mechanism?
• What kind of energy is involved?
• How is that energy transported?
• What variables change the result?
• What assumptions were made?
• Are the cited calculations or studies actually applicable?
• What happens if an assumption is wrong?
• Does the claimed result make physical sense?

That way of thinking transfers extremely well to therapy equipment.

A vet and an engineer are answering different questions

A veterinarian is trained to understand the horse: anatomy, physiology, pathology, diagnosis, pharmacology, surgery, disease, injury, and treatment.

An engineer is trained to understand the system: how a device generates energy, how that energy moves, how output changes with geometry and settings, what physical laws apply, how measurements should be interpreted, and whether the claims match the evidence.

There is overlap, but the jobs are not interchangeable.

If you want to know what is wrong with your horse, ask your veterinarian.

If you want to know whether citing a PEMF paper for a static magnetic blanket makes physical sense, that is very much an engineering question.

Criticality safety engineering makes you allergic to bad assumptions 😂

In nuclear criticality safety, a bad assumption is not a cute little technicality. The entire analysis depends on whether the model actually represents the real system.

You cannot take data from one configuration, apply it to a completely different configuration, and call it close enough. You have to justify why the data, calculation, model, or experiment is applicable. In my line of work, getting that wrong can have serious consequences.

That is why I get so irritated when equine products are backed by citations that do not actually match the technology being sold.

If a study used a pulsed electromagnetic field device, you cannot automatically use it to prove a static permanent magnet works.

If a laser study used a specific wavelength, power density, treatment duration, and beam geometry, you cannot assume every red light product delivers the same tissue dose.

If a study used one species, one tissue depth, or one treatment protocol, you have to ask whether those conditions apply to a horse.

That is not me “playing veterinarian.” That is the same kind of applicability review criticality engineers do every day.

My physics background is especially useful with therapy equipment

A lot of modern therapy equipment starts as a physics problem before it becomes a biology problem.

PEMF starts with coils, current, magnetic-field strength, waveform, frequency, pulse timing, geometry, and electromagnetic induction.

Red light and laser therapy start with wavelength, photon energy, optical power, irradiance, fluence, absorption, scattering, reflection, tissue penetration, and treatment geometry.

MRI involves static magnetic fields, gradient fields, radiofrequency excitation, resonance, signal detection, and image reconstruction.

Shockwave involves pressure waves, pulse characteristics, tissue interfaces, and mechanical energy transfer.

TECAR and radiofrequency systems involve alternating electric fields, current pathways, frequency, impedance, and energy deposition.

Before I care about a list of biological benefits, I want to know what the machine is physically delivering.

That is the part of this science world I am especially comfortable dissecting.

Nuclear engineering also teaches you to think about energy moving through matter

My profession constantly deals with particles, radiation, fields, material properties, transport, interaction probabilities, geometry, shielding, attenuation, and energy deposition.

No, neutron transport in a fuel facility is not the same thing as infrared light moving through a horse 😂 but the physics questions still apply in the same way:

• What is the source?
• What is the energy?
• What material is it traveling through?
• What gets absorbed?
• What gets scattered?
• What gets transmitted?
• How does distance or geometry change the result?
• What does the actual calculation or experiment show?

When I look at wavelength penetration, coil geometry, field strength, energy density, or tissue depth, I am not approaching it like a salesperson memorizing three benefits from a product sheet.

I am trying to understand the physical system.

And yes, Monte Carlo calculations are part of why my brain works this way

Monte Carlo methods are heavily used in nuclear engineering to model complex neutron transport and probabilistic physical interactions.

That mindset is useful outside quantum mechanics too. Instead of pretending everything travels in a perfectly neat straight line, you account for geometry, interaction probabilities, scattering, absorption, and a huge number of possible particle histories.

That is why I cringe when complicated concepts like light penetration get reduced to one cute arrow going straight through tissue.

Real applied physics is messy. 

Light can scatter. It can be absorbed or reflected. Geometry matters. Tissue composition matters. Hair matters. Skin pigmentation matters. Distance matters. Power matters. Time matters.

Understanding those variables is a big reason I ended up redesigning products instead of simply reselling whatever was already available. 

What I am NOT claiming

I am not claiming my engineering degree makes me a veterinarian, or smarter than one. 

I do not diagnose horses. I do not prescribe treatment plans. I do not use physics calculations as a substitute for veterinary medicine.

I also do not believe an engineering degree automatically makes someone right. If the data says I am wrong, I change my conclusion. (You haven’t been humbled until one of your college professors writes “this is shit” on an exam answer that took you an hour and three pages to calculate 😂🙃 - true story)

What I am qualified to analyze includes:

• how a therapy machine generates its output,
• whether two technologies actually operate by the same mechanism,
• whether a wavelength or magnetic-field claim makes physical sense,
• whether a citation applies to the product being sold,
• how energy moves through tissue,
• how output changes with geometry or settings,
• and whether the marketing language matches the actual device.

Those are ALL engineering questions.

The best answer is collaboration

I do not want engineers replacing veterinarians, and I do not think veterinarians should be expected to be electrical, optical, mechanical, and nuclear engineers on top of everything else they already have to know. That would be ridiculous.

Veterinarian: What is happening in the horse, and is this therapy appropriate for this patient?

Engineer: What is this device physically producing, how is it delivering that energy, and do its specifications and claims make sense?

Researcher: What does controlled experimental evidence show under defined conditions?

Horse owner or practitioner: Is the equipment practical, usable, and repeatable in the real world?

Those perspectives work better together than they do pretending one profession should cover all four jobs. It takes a village - and I am happy to stay in my lane. Which is also why you won’t see me making posts about equine nutrition or supplements. Or tell girls in the NFR how to leg up their horse properly. Those are not tools I have in my personal toolbox 🧰 

So... “you aren’t a vet.”

Nope.

I am the person who calls the vet when I need veterinary medicine or medical advice. I am also the person all my vet friends call when somebody is trying to sell them “new and upgraded” therapy equipment for $70k and they want to know what the machine actually does. ⚙️ 

When someone puts an electromagnetic machine, optical therapy device, laser, radiofrequency system, or magnetic product in front of me and asks, “Does the physics behind this claim actually make sense?”

That is a different question.

And it happens to be one I am pretty well trained to answer. 😂🛠️ 

This article explains my engineering perspective on therapy-device technology. It is educational information and is not veterinary diagnosis, treatment, or medical advice.