4MyChild: Help and Hope for Life

March 31, 2007

Article on Horseback Riding as Cerebral Palsy Therapy

Quite a nice article from St. Louis Today on using slightly injured working horses to help children with cerebral palsy. The use of horseback riding as therapy, or hippotherapy, has become widely used in physiotherapy for children with cerebral palsy.

Once a fox-hunting horse, Beau suffered a leg injury that forced him to embark on a second career — as a therapist.

The therapy comes from the gentle rocking motion the 17-year-old flea-bitten Arabian gray makes as it ambles through a paddock, a stone’s throw from the Mississippi River at Ride On St. Louis, a therapeutic riding center in Kimmswick. Nathan Collier, an 8-year-old with cerebral palsy, struggles to remain upright on Beau as he lifts a purple swimming pool noodle over his head. But he’s all smiles.

“The children don’t know they’re getting therapy,” said physical therapist Anne Cochran. “They’re just having fun.”

A small but growing number of scientific studies are showing how hippotherapy — from the Greek word “hippos,” for horse — can help children with cerebral palsy, a neurological disability that keeps them from smoothly controlling their muscles. The theory: The rocking motion of a horse creates more than 100 small shoves a minute. A child would therefore strengthen core muscles and neural connections about 3,000 times in a 30-minute therapy session.

To read entire article visit:

http://www.stltoday.com/stltoday/news/stories.nsf/illinoisnews/story/771AC66E9830D83A862572AF0010DF04?OpenDocument