Dr. Mary Durando
“One of these days I will have a race horse of my own—I absolutely love horseracing,” said Dr. Mary Durando, DVM, PhD. Meanwhile she’s an ultrasound, cardiology and internal medicine specialist for the UMEC.
Durando was a horse-crazy child in Lake Worth, Florida, where her late father was a jockey, and her mother (who had galloped race horses for such famous trainers as Ben Jones of Calumet Farms, Horatio Luro, Max Hirsch and others), set up a stable to rehabilitate racehorses and break yearlings.
“We always had horses getting legged up, conditioning to get back to the track,” said Durando.
She first rode Shetland ponies, and when she was 10 her first horse was an 18 year old thoroughbred stallion off the race track.
“I rode him bareback and with mares, he was the nicest guy,” she said. “We rode for hours on trails and through the swamps and water, and sometimes did moonlight rides. All I wanted to do was ride horses.”
At the University of Georgia, in Athens, where Durando majored in genetics and also earned her DVM, her mentors included surgeon Dr. Jim Moore, a well-known investigator of colic, a common and sometimes fatal affliction of horses. A syndrome related to colic called endotoxemia (similar to septic shock in people) became her particular interest.
Durando enjoyed some hands-on practice working at an equine clinic outside Richmond, Virginia for a year, and followed that with a six month internship in medicine at Rood and Riddle Equine Hospital in Lexington, Kentucky. She also worked at Jonabell Farm in Lexington preparing yearlings for the summer sales at Keeneland.
After additional training at the University of California, Davis assisting residents with their projects, she completed her residency at the University of Florida, Gainesville where she became board certified in internal medicine. She followed that with a doctorate in physiology, studying endotoxemia, from the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston.
At the University of Pennsylvania’s New Bolton Center Durando did ultrasound and cardiology and then conducted performance evaluations of racehorses and other performance horses using the treadmill. In late 2006, she was enticed to join the UMEC team.
She is excited to be part of a clinic in a beautiful new facility that allows staff to do many types of diagnostics, treatments and sports medicine, and where people are committed to fully evaluating reasons for poor performance.
“Not many places have a high speed treadmill or can put such emphasis on determining why horses are not performing well,” she said. “And here at UMEC there is a group of people with related interests including Dr. Stephanie Valberg, who does muscle work and Dr. Troy Trumble in orthopedics. It’s very appealing to me.”
“Horses are easy subjects for studying performance in some ways,” she said. “Because they are large, you can readily insert catheters into their arteries and veins and perform studies more easily than small animal in some respects, but they are also so athletic and big that some diagnostics can be very challenging. The equipment at the Leatherdale Equine Center is an exciting match for this challenge. We have a lot more to learn about horses, and these are fascinating areas of research which readily translate to clinical application.
The more you learn about what horses are capable of doing, the more amazing they are.”
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Dr. Mary Durando is board certified by the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine, Large Animal" |