What is hippotherapy?
About hippotherapy known since the time of Hippocrates. He claimed that the wounded and the sick get better faster if they ride on horseback, and melancholic part with their dark thoughts.
In the middle of the XVIII century the encyclopedist Denis Diderot, in his treatise: "About riding and what it means to maintain health and to find it again", wrote: "Among the exercise the first place belongs to ride. It can be used to treat many diseases, but may also prevent them befores they appear."
Hippotherapy is a comprehensive and multi-method of rehabilitation, a form of physiotherapy (physical therapy), where tools for rehabilitation are the horse, the process of riding and exercising that a person does during riding.
While riding all the major muscle groups of the body receive a work out. This occurs at a reflex level, because sitting on the horse, moving along with it, the person instinctively tries to keep the balance not to fall off the horse, and thus encourages the active work of both healthy and affected muscles, without noticing it.
Hippotherapy is the only type of treatment when the patient may not understand that he is treated, riding and communication with the horse becomes a game. Psychogenic factor increases the ability to adapt to reality. For a person with a mental disorder, the position on a horse becomes winning - "I above, but they below". All