Therapeutic Riding Is Not New

Therapeutic riding is not new. The boy with cerebral palsy I mentioned earlier, Cameron, who is now seven, has his own balance disc. His mother says, It brings nothing but smiles and talking when he gets on the disc. He loves it. Cameron loves his swing in the backyard, as well. Some loud bells hung on the tree behind it jingle when he goes up high enough. For a child like Cameron, every bit of gravity stimulation is therapy. Since he cannot move by himself, he cannot get enough stimulation in the course of the day to keep his gravity sensors tuned. I encouraged Cameron’s mother to take him on a roller coaster, but the amusement park company would not allow it, so when they came to the next spinning ride, she did not ask. She just got on with him and he loved it! It is a small computerized platform that tilts back and forth, on which the astronaut stands with eyes open or eyes closed. The degree of sway is used to evaluate the extent of balance and coordination deficit. In fact, it measures how well the body senses and is able to respond to the instability caused by standing on the platform.

As Light As A Breeze

Because it is so sensitive, this sway test is now being used by the National Institute on Aging in its Baltimore Aging Longitudinal Study to detect the age at which the earliest onset of balance problems can be detected. Wynford Dore, a British industrialist in Australia, picked up on this idea and put together a team to use the sway platform not as a test as originally designed, but in a treatment approach for his daughter, who suffered from severe chronic learning difficulties. The treatment is expensive, costing around $3,000, and takes up to 15 months to complete. Even visual or hearing impairments, as well as emotional disorders such as depression, have been said to benefit. A French physician in the 1870s began using horseback riding treatment for neurological disorders, concluding that the movements of the horse helped his patients’ balance, posture, joints, and muscles. She comments that no machine has ever been invented to take the place of a horse’s muscle groups, moving from side to side, forward and backward, and upward and downward. They closely mimic the human gait. Critics dismiss it as alternative medicine with little scientific proof to back it. However, it is difficult to set up meaningful research designs because of the inexact nature of each treatment, complicated by variables such as different kinds of horses and instructors, as well as the broad range of conditions and ailments being treated. Most of us do this by getting up out of bed or from a chair or off the floor. Not only are bones and muscles stimulated, but this also does wonders for the development and regulation of blood pressure sensors. However, those who never developed these sensors, or lost them, or had their sensors lose sensitivity, experience problems with maintaining blood pressure.

Lay It Down

They can no longer respond reflexively to sitting up or standing with an appropriate rise in heart pumping, sufficient to protect them from the drop in blood pressure that could lead to fainting. Even if they do not faint and fall, they will feel unwell, weak, and possibly sweat or become nauseated. Ideally, practicing standing up often and deliberately is the simplest treatment. People who use these chairs may find they no longer need the chair after a while. Changing posture often means every 15 to 20 minutes throughout the day. This interval allows the body time to ideally recover from the stimulus and response to each standing event before the next one. It is highly probable that patients following this regimen would regain the ability to stand up on their own and move about. Now imagine a child with cerebral palsy or other brain injury at birth who has not had the benefit of alternating postural change that comes with normal development of movement and coordination. Such a child will not have developed the needed pressure reflex sensitivity to respond to sitting up or being held up. He or she may well feel faint, nauseous, unwell, weak, and may even vomit when sitting up, but how would one know? These children cannot communicate what they feel. Why would any parent or caregiver think these symptoms are not directly due to the brain injury and can be prevented? Why should this child be any more handicapped than necessary? Frequent changes in posture are the answer. I am unaware of a commercial product that provides this type of treatment, but something simple could be rigged up.

Make Me Smile

A steeper tilt up would be ideal, but it would be so much better if posture change were part of a game. These are only a few examples of how understanding and using gravity and hypergravity is beginning to find its way into the treatment of musculoskeletal, bone, metabolic, cardiovascular, and neurological disorders. Infants and very young children have the most to gain, given the extraordinary plasticity of their nervous system. The state of health in the world is deteriorating. In the United States, two out of every three people are unhealthy. This alarming trend must be stemmed and reversed, or it will cripple personal health, national vitality, and resources. Something needs to be done. The culprit is neither a virus nor a toxic pollutant. The enemy is a transformation in lifestyle that probably saw its beginnings with urbanization during the Industrial Revolution. A change from physically working the land and needing hearty meals was now followed by standing in factory assembly lines while eating just as much, particularly carbohydrates. This shift accelerated in the 20th century, when even more sedentary forms of work were accompanied by eating more food than required by the body. And food itself changed with the widescale use of canning and preservation, followed by the introduction of freezers and the addition of chemicals to maintain food crispness and enhance its color appeal.