Human medicine holds the use of these agents as standard care, not as alternatives to accepted medical practice. For the horse, the use of equine therapy tools and techniques are a valuable aid to rehabilitation, making it more comfortable, enabling the horse to be more functional throughout recovery, and shortening the duration of recovery. An equine therapist should be skilled in goal-oriented treatment processes and knowledgeable in all therapeutic modalities. The techniques of the equine therapist are applied to reduce tissue inflammation, to relieve pain, to reduce tissue congestion, to alter circulatory flow, to increase collagen extensibility, to maintain muscle tone, and to increase the patient's sense of well being. They are applied as preparation for controlled exercise and used to make rehabilitative exercise more comfortable.
Equine therapy is applied post-surgically or after an injury to shorten the recovery time.
The techniques of the equine therapist are useful as part of the daily training regimen of the athletic horse to minimize post-exercise muscle soreness and the wear and tear effects of sports training and competition. In this manner, equine therapy techniques can be used preventatively, reducing the cumulative effects of over-use injuries. Until recently there has been little research using horses as subjects to validate the claims made for the effects of therapeutic modalities. This is changing rapidly, as veterinary interest in these tools and techniques grows. Not only is the body of research using horses growing, the research on new modalities such as photon and laser energy and magnetic fields has increased.