Veterinarian has magic touch with horses When a horse is in pain on the Peninsula, its owners often call veterinarian Dr. Nancy Elliot. Her medical kit contains no test tubes or portable X-ray machine, however. Just some acupuncture needles and a steady pair of hands. Elliot, a licensed horse veterinarian, switched from a traditional practice to treating horses with a combination of acupuncture and chiropractic techniques 20 years ago and never looked back. She concedes that her speciality may seem unusual to nonhorse people — she's the only veterinarian on the Peninsula exclusively devoted to both methods — but horse owners swear by her touch. On the surface, the jeans-clad, blond-haired Pescadero resident looks more like a rancher than a practitioner of Eastern medicine. But Elliot got hooked on it when she graduated from veterinary school in 1988 and started working at Peninsula Equine Medical Center. There she met a self-taught horse chiropractor and noticed how horses responded to her. "I could go over to a horse and touch his body and find things that were not right. She would work on him. She had this ease with the horses in a way I had never seen." Elliot also noticed how many cases would fall into a "grey area" — situations where a vet would be able to treat the symptoms but not the underlying cause of a chronic injury. The idea of working with a horse's body through movement to promote its own healing tendencies appealed to her, and acupuncture became an essential part of that vision as well....