Ana Galeote, Laure Bastien, Helene Viruega and Manuel Gaviria
Traumatic brain injury is an unexpected and heavily disabling event occurring mostly in young adults, frequently
leading to devastating consequences for the individual and his relatives. Therapeutic alternatives are limited and
neurological rehabilitation remains relatively confidential. Besides, therapeutic success when noticed is mostly
empirical and need to be scientifically clarified. Hippotherapy is a rather novel therapeutic approach where by the
therapist uses the horse’s movement as a therapeutic intervention or support. Multimodal sensory inputs generated
by the horse’s rhythmic walk generate adaptive responses in the patient that conceivably promote plastic changes in
brain circuits. The consolidation of motor and non-motor improvements depends partly on the congruence of the
session frequency and content. In this paper, we describe the improvements noticed during a two-year’ series of
short programs of hippotherapy in a patient that suffered a severe traumatic brain injury in 2010 that generated
permanent serious neurological and neurobehavioral sequelae.
