Hello, everyone!

This is Dr Beth Macauley, and I am a speech-language pathologist in the United States specializing in hippotherapy and Equine-Assisted Speech Therapy. I'm also an associate professor in the Department of Communication Sciences and Disorders at Grand Valley State University in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Which is really crazy for me because Michigan has a lot of snow, and I grew up in Florida. I'm a Florida girl, love my sun, love my beaches. But I'm in Michigan.

So welcome, welcome to this course on Equine Assisted Services, specializing in speech, language, pathology. It is my my favorite area of work that I do. It combines my 1st love, which is working with people and children with disabilities in communication and swallowing with my second favorite thing in the world – horses. And the way that we combine those 2 to bring about the communication abilities of our clients. It's just it's amazing. It's amazing. And so, through this course I share with you some of the background about why the horse is important within speech therapy.

We talk about some of the neurological reasons why; then I expand into some different types of clients that we see in speech pathology, how the horse can help them, and how we mirror, not mirror, how we integrate our skilled speech, therapy knowledge and skills and services into the hippotherapy, the equine-assisted therapy environment. So our skills plus the horse just help the clients achieve their goals, and even then, sometimes do communication abilities that we don't believe we don't think they're going to do, or other people don't think they're going to do. But in this context, we could help them get there.

So the biggest thing for you to remember about incorporating hippotherapy in the horses into speech is that we're talking about the same nervous system that we see improvements in physical therapy, occupational therapy, and psychology counselling. It's all the same nervous system. The main difference is with speech. Unless you test for it and look for it, you don't realize how it's really affecting them. Their abilities with physical therapy, they get off the horse, they walk better. Wow! That's an improvement with occupational therapy. They get off the horse so they can unzip their coat better, or they can brush their hair better. But with speech, if we don't ask them to speak or do things, we may not recognize the difference that it's making. But you will see it each time they're on the horse you will see improvements and just growth in what you are working on for your communication goals. I love using the horse for our people with dysarthria and apraxia of speech because that movement facilitates the coordination of neural mechanisms.

Speech is a motor activity. In fact, speech is the fastest motor activity your body does in the fastest sequence of motor movements, followed by swallowing. And it's both in our scope of practice. So, we see improvements in motor control and motor coordination of speech. But what we also see are improvements in cognition of words, finding, putting words together, and answering questions. Again, the horse doesn't do it by itself. But the horse, plus our skilled services, gives a tremendous, tremendous ability of us to help improve them. So, I hope you enjoy this speech pathology course within the big equine-assisted services course, and I'm always available. If you have any questions, if you have, if you want to talk about particular patients, or if you want to see more videos, let me know. I did include a bunch in this section. But of course, I always have more, and I'm always creating more so that we can add to more specific courses later for clients with specific medical disabilities or specific diagnoses. To go from this, this one is considered. I would consider a broad overview of what SPL with horses can do and then give you some specific examples of how I have applied it. But there's always room to learn more. Always learn to see more, and some of my current clients are doing amazing, and I want to brag about them later. So again, I'm always open to questions, enjoy the course, and have a good time.

Thanks, everybody. Bye.