Monday, May 15th, 2017
Longtime California friends Nancy Schier Anzelmo and Paula Hertel were already specialists in elder care — and both avid equestrians — when they developed a bold idea. They wanted to combine their unique interests to improve the lives of people facing dementia. The result from these friends, after a great deal of study, is Connected Horse, a series of facilitated workshops aimed at helping early-stage dementia patients and their care partners experience what the women call a horse’s healing presence.
“As equestrians, we know there’s a very real healing presence about horses,” Anzelmo wrote on their blog. “After a bad day, all we have to do is go out in nature, ‘be’ with our horses, relax, and just feel better. There are in-depth studies of the effects of equine work on the stress hormone cortisol, mostly with adolescents, which show [that] with horse therapy, there’s an almost immediate drop in cortisol levels.”