If your horse has been injured, or has had to undergo surgery, integrating massage into their post-operative or post-injury care routine could offer significant health benefits. Here’s why:
Specialized Training: Equine massage therapists undergo specialized training to address soft tissues, aiming to enhance circulation, lymph drainage, and release endorphins. These effects contribute to healing as well as reducing your horse’s discomfort and pain.
Facilitates Recovery: Pain and tension can hinder the body’s natural recovery process, prolonging healing time. By mitigating pain, massage therapy can facilitate a smoother recovery.
Potential To Reduce The Use Of NSAIDS: For horses requiring pain medications like NSAIDS, massage may help reduce the pain enough that they can reduce their dosage, potentially decreasing the risk and severity of adverse effects such as ulcers and colic.
Alleviates Tension and Stress: Massage can help alleviate the tension and stress placed on muscles and other soft tissues by the injury induced altered mechanics.
Promotes Relaxation: Massage helps relax the horse into parasympathetic state, the state in which optimal healing occurs.
Addresses Stress-Induced Behaviors: Massage can reduce stress-induced behaviors such as stall-walking, weaving, and cribbing, which contribute to unwanted wear and tear on the horse and deplete valuable healing resources.
Potential for Owner Involvement: Interested owners may even learn useful, low-risk techniques from their equine massage therapist to support their animal’s recovery and comfort.
Research Findings: While research on massage therapy for animals is limited, many human studies have shown significant reductions in pain perception and distress with postoperative massage. One study at the Mayo Clinic demonstrated such substantial relief from both pain and anxiety in patients undergoing abdominal colorectal surgery, that they have since made changes in their care protocol policies to include massage.
Another study demonstrated that just five minutes of massage to each hand and foot significantly reduced the perception of pain and distress in post-surgical patients, with an average reported reduction of 53%.
When massaging a horse with any sort of compromised condition, it’s crucial to handle the process with utmost care and consideration for his individual needs. Injured horses, or those compromised by surgery, may have increased anxiety, instability, and pain. Clear and open communication between the Vet, the owner and the massage therapist will facilitate the best possible care for your horse.
While some horses may initially be unsure of hands-on healing, they typically learn very quickly that it helps them feel better. They soon look forward to their sessions and even to participate, helping to guide their therapist to the areas they enjoy being massaged most.
By integrating massage therapy into your horse’s post-operative or post-injury care routine, you can contribute to their comfort, recovery, and overall well-being.
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