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Originally Posted by Cannon Shell
Steve's trainer source may be correct as milkshakes do work really well on certain horses and can move them up. We have plenty of proof that they worked as they were legal for years and if bet the Derby you likely bet on a milkshaked horse. But unlike a "hop" some horses didnt run better or actually ran worse on them. You would also see the a major improvement the first time but not the second or third.
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Not to mention the dead Standardbreds while trainers tried to get the dose right.
It's very difficult, even if you have a bloodgas machine, an IV line, a bottle of pharmaceutical sodium bicarbonate, and a syringe, to alter a blood gas if necessary in a patient. There's a simple formula that's used. But the body has it's own compensatory mechanisms, and starts fighting any adjustments one makes. It's not utterly simple - you push the pH one way, you will change other things. You do that in a horse that's dehydrated from it's lasix, losing electrolytes in sweat on a hot day, and you could find yourself playing with fire. Or the insurance company.
Certainly one can use sodium bicarbonate to help delay muscle fatigue, and it works. But yeah, getting the dose correct - considering ambient temperature, lasix dose, what the horse ate that day, etc - would be difficult.
By correct I mean a dose that works, but isn't detectable as an overage (overages on TCO2 are set using standard laboratory practice of using standard deviations from the mean). I don't doubt some trainers sneak in their "micro dose" of soda bicarb on race day - but I don't buy that it's as predictable a result as some think (based upon how laboratories have always measured and established TCO2 levels, and what "normal patients" produce, the variations seen, etc). Your observation seems to match that.
I was talking to a vet who does alot of university research into TCO2 last month at a CE lecture. Talking that some handicappers want all TCO2 levels published, even if the levels are below the overage level.
These handicappers maintain that high, but legal levels, are nearly always a result of these trainers using "micro-milkshaking".
I think that will just result in false accusations and a witch hunt for milkshaking in guys whose horses are running at routinely high levels - because yeah, there is a good chance these guys could indeed be micromilkshaking and staying legal, or they could have changed feeds, or given the horse a bigger dose of lasix on a hot day.
Multiple things other than orally administered sodium bicarbonate affect the measurable TCO2, and some people don't want to recognize that.