Registered office: Heather Lodge, Edlingham, Alnwick, Northumberland, NE66 2BL, UK. Tel: 01665-574727, © 2011

OUR SERVICES

In addition to hippotherapy, we also provide

international advice/consultancy on

hippotherapy practice and research, and

training for physiotherapists. To find out

more about how we may be able to help

you, please click on the links on the left and

read on.

International Practice and Research

Unfortunately, to date, many studies

investigating the effetcs of therapeutic

riding including hippotherapy and the use of

horses in special education and psychology

have provided evidence of clinical, but not

statistically significant changes.  This is

usually because of flaws in the study

design, including the use of inappropriate

Getting research design and methodology

right makes the difference between being

able to demonstrate the effectiveness of an

Dorothée Debuse has considerable

expertise not only in hippotherapy practice,

but also in research. She gained her

doctorate with a five-year research study

on the effects of hippotherapy on people

Her work at Northumbria University

involves a lot of post-graduate research

supervision. She is also regularly involved

in the university’s Research Ethics review

process, and is on the editorial board of a

new international journal on the

therapeutic use of horses for people. She

also is a reviewer for the International

Journal for Therapy and Rehabilitation

and for Neural Rehabilitation and Neural

Repair.

As for hippotherapy in practice,

Dorothée’s expertise clearly includes

hippotherapy practice and theory, as well

as therapeutic-riding specific training and

schooling of horses. She has also got a

lot of experience of different hippotherapy

set-ups, in terms of riding arena structure

and lay-out and different designs of

mounting facilities and their integration

into “normal” riding arenas. Due to her

good connections to many physiothera-

pists practising hippotherapy and

therapeutic riding throughout Europe and

beyond she is also able to facilitate

Dorothée was invited to teach on a two-

day workshop on hippotherapy and

therapeutic riding related horse training in

Norway in March 2010,  and she has an

open invitation to teach in Japan. In May

2010 a group from Sweden visited us to

learn from our practice and experience,

and Dorothée has been asked to advise a

budding therapeutic riding project in

For an informal discussion of how she

may be able to help you and your