Well here's the story:
My flat-coat retriever started limping one day seemingly out of the blue. My wife and I took him to the vet, they did X_rays and a radiologist determined it was not elbow dysplasia. (hooray!). In fact, they said he had really excellent looking bones for a 6 year-old!
OK that's the good news.
But, the bad news was that his tendon (at the elbow) was very inflamed. Vet thought this my be because of dysplasia hence the x-rays, but since they were negative, he believes to be tendonitis. Because my dog plays frisbee almost everyday, our vet says he sees this often in frisbee dogs. The treatment is rest and rimodyl. The problem is the rimodyl makes my dog feel better, so he plays (with the other dogs).
I say like owner like dog because I myself have knee problems, yet I still play basketball because I enjoy it. My knees feel better, so I play and after awhile my knees hurt again. Now, I don't mean to say that my wife or I still throw frisbee with him, in fact we discourage play whenever we see it. Vet told us 6 weeks no play to heal properly. But as I say, like owner like dog.
He is feeling better ( I believe primarily because of the rimodyl), even though we discourage he still will start playing sometimes with the other dogs, and then start limping even if we stop it right away.
I'm, just wondering even humans (myself) who are supremely intelligent species (or so we would like to believe, tho I am not convinced) cannot stop playing when they feel better even though they know they should wait even longer to heal properly.
So how do we stop our dogs from doing the same thing?
