For Excellence in the Horse’s Performance, For Recovery of the Traumatized Horse — By Karina Burchard. Published in Bridle & Bit, January 2005 Issue.
The environment and the settings that we are providing for our horses often give cause to a variety of situations that can bear hidden dangers for traumas and injuries to our horses. Often times such are also generated through our own thoughtless and careless handling or by our inconsideration in their handling and treatment. The tight quarters that we often provide them with give little room for proper movement thus adding to the possibility of mental and/or physical traumas. When training and exercising them and during our regular equine activities we easily can put the horses into injury prone situations, especially if we are pushing them too hard mentally and/or physically or even –intentionally or not- are abusing them.
Traumas or small injuries to our horses are often times not easily recognized and frequently escape our attention, and as a result we often wonder about sudden or slowly developing negative, unwanted behavior or movement patterns that we essentially cannot explain, so we might ask ourselves where these changes might have originated from.
Help is available in situations like these in form of a well established therapy called “Equine CranioSacral Therapy”. The notion of this therapy is based on the recognition and knowledge of a biological system in the horse’s body, reaching – as the name indicates – all the way from the head to the hind end, the sacrum, of the horse. This biological system can be identified, perceived and positively influenced by a practitioner well educated in the application of this therapy. The therapy does not employ equine psychiatry or “voodoo” proceedings. Instead it involves hands-on interaction between the well trained practitioner of this therapy and the horse, by which the CranioSacral system of the horse is being sensed and positively influenced with radiating effects through the whole physical and mental entity and constitution of the horse.
Have you ever had a horse in your barn that went through all kinds of diagnostics and treatments but still does not seem to get better?
Did your horse ever suddenly start refusing to accept the bit? Or have you ever had a horse with great potential, but it was a headshaker and you have not been successful in alleviating this problem?
For those and many more problem horses there now is hope: called Equine CranioSacral Therapy.
This therapy has been used successfully for many years in humans and now also gains great momentum in the equine world.
Equine CranioSacral Therapy addresses the horse’s craniosacral system which includes its cranium, spinal column and sacrum. The spinal fluid surrounding the brain and the spinal cord nourishes, protects and lubricates them. The Equine CranioSacral Therapist looks and feels for imbalances and restrictions of the movement of the horse’s spinal fluid. Restrictions can stem from imbalanced bones, scar tissues, tightness in muscles or soft tissue, calcifications etc. Equine CranioSacral Therapy will assist in removing these restrictions, provide and restore balance and smoothness.
Picture 1: Axial Skeleton: connecting the Horse from Head to Tail and housing the craniosacral system.
If a horse had a blow to the head, had a trailer wreck or a pull back accident for instance, the intricate system of cranial bones is very likely to get out of balance.
The cranial bones join each other in a web of sutures providing a limited amount of movement between each other. Some of these bones serve as “shock absorbers”, others include air sinuses.
Picture 2: Cranial Bones of the Horse connected by Joints and Sutures.
Any imbalance at the horses head might impede free movement of bones, tissue and fluids and even can lead to nerve impingements. Consequences can include compromised vision, headaches or abnormal gait and movement pattern. Those imbalances themselves might be unnoticeable to the untrained eye, since they might only be in the order of microns.
An experience in the dentist’s chair might illustrate for you this type of imbalance. When a carbon paper that is only a couple of microns thick is placed between your teeth for testing, you will immediately feel a resulting imbalance in your teeth. The same happens with a new filling which is not absolutely correctly fitting to the opposing tooth.
The sutures in the cranial bones are delicately designed to allow for microscopic movement but still fit wonderfully together. The spookiness of a horse for instance, might be caused by some vision impairment due to imbalances in the cranial bones that can impinge on an optical nerve. Equine CranioSacral Therapy can be a powerful tool to address such and similar issues.
A too tight noseband for instance might prevent the horse from fully using his respiratory capacity which of course in turn would affect his performance and movement, lead to undesirable and unbalanced behavioral and movement patterns that might prevail even if and when the original cause has been removed.
Patterns like these can be broken up by Equine CranioSacral Therapy which is a very deep reaching healing method and brings the horse back to a well balanced body- and mind-set.
Dental care is one of the very important aspects of horse health care. However, like humans, horses don’t like the dentist. In order to perform the necessary dental work the equine dentist will often use a speculum and sedation. While the horse’s mouth is cracked open, the muscles are trying to contract and close the mouth. In addition either electrical or manual tools are used to rasp the teeth and do the necessary dental work which inevitably include noise, vibrations and unnatural and prolonged head and jaw postures. The same experience you might have after extensive dental work on your own teeth the horse definitely will experience, too. After dental work, facial and mandibular muscles for a pretty long time might be tense, imbalanced and even sore. Here as a therapeutic procedure the Equine CranioSacral Therapy should come into play as a very important and beneficial tool for a speedy recovery from this kind of trauma. It will bring back balance to muscles, bones, tendons and other soft tissue.
Equine CranioSacral Therapy however is not limited to the work on the head but it stretches out through the spine and ribs to the pelvis and sacrum and the rest of the body. Oftentimes even if there was a trauma to the head of the horse, the practitioner might start out on the sacrum or on the ribs. For example, if there was a blow to the head, the horse might refuse to be touched directly at the injured area, however since the craniosacral system connects the whole body, working on one end of the system will effect the total system.
At the same token a trauma in one area of the body might result in problems in a different area of the system. E.g. a trauma to the rear end might show pathological effects in the head area of the horse or in other parts of the muscular-skeletal system like legs, etc.. Therefore treating the original trauma in the rear end area could alleviate the problems in the head or other areas.
Looking at the pelvis one can see the delicate structure that the pelvic bones form with the sacrum. The sacrum is beautifully suspended between the pelvis’ ileum bones. Imbalances at this juncture are not infrequent and can very successfully be corrected by the Equine CranioSacral Therapy.
Picture 3: (left) Crania l (from the front) view of the Pelvis; (right) Dorsal (from above) view of the Pelvis.
The phenomenon of the connected system is the basis for the Equine CranioSacral Practitioner when treating horses. Therefore working on the horse’s sacrum will have effect all the way up to his poll and beyond. The place of an injury or impact or the place where symptoms show up, are often times not the first choice of starting the treatment. Working on the head and the cranial bones might very well impact gait and movement of the horse and vice versa working on pelvis and sacrum might help in alleviating TMJ (Temporal Mandibular Joint) problems and improve respiratory and cardiovascular systems.
This holistic therapy is powerful in its subtleness. The manual pressure applied by the therapist’s hands during the physical treatment is mostly not exceeding 5g, which – as years of experience and results show – is plenty enough to initiate the healing process.
The practitioner is giving guidance and support to the self healing process in the horse. He/She is basically initiating the way to restoration and healing and enabling the horse to regain his physical and mental balance.
About the author
Karina Burchard is a Licensed Human Massage Therapist as well as a Certified Equine Massage Therapist graduated from the Arizona Institute of Equine Massage Therapy and Kinesiology. Since 1996 she has been extensively involved in Equine and Equestrian Activities as a therapist as well as a frequent rider. She has been continually expanding her knowledge through attending worldwide seminars and courses in Human and Equine Massage modalities and Equine CranioSacral Therapy.
One of her specialties is the analysis of the horse and rider entity as a team, identifying their interrelated problem areas and maximizing both their performances by attending to the horse as well as to the rider. She combines different bodywork modalities in each session, providing optimum care for horse and rider.
For more information please contact Karina Burchard.