Pet therapy

As far back as the time of Hippocrates it was known that pets have a good effect on human health. The term “pet therapy”, however, appeared comparatively recently — in the middle of the twentieth century. That was when Boris Levinson, a child psychiatrist in the United States, noticed that his small patients responded well to the dog that was very often in the waiting room during a treatment session. At that time, admittedly, there was still no scientifically grounded proof of the healing effect that pets have on people. Only at the end of the twentieth century did scientific work on pet therapy appear, showing that the company of pets does a person an enormous amount of good. Since then the method has spread fairly widely in the West.

Hundreds of researchers are studying the subject today. In our own country, admittedly, specialists in pet therapy are very few. For some reason the method is not taken seriously here. Abroad, on the other hand — in the United States and some European countries in particular — therapy with the help of pets has already moved out of the category of alternative medicine and into doctors’ everyday practice. Some countries even run courses for pet therapy specialists, on completing which doctors are entitled to go into private practice.

In what way, then, do pets help people cope with their ailments?

In the first place, simply by being near a person, animals put them in a good mood and serve as a kind of incentive to live, particularly for people who live alone. The animal becomes not only the object of their care and attention but their best friend. A four-legged friend loves its owner as they are, whatever their age, their looks or their state of mind.

In the second place, pets are able to rid a person of many serious illnesses. What is more, animals have a therapeutic effect merely by being there, creating a favourable field of energy.

In the third place, animals help doctors make contact with patients who, for a number of psychological and physical reasons, refuse to talk to a psychologist or any other specialist. In the United States and some countries of Europe pet therapy is used to treat depression, autism, Down’s syndrome and various disturbances of brain activity that show themselves as some form of addiction or aggression. Pets also help patients cope with constant anxiety and with insomnia. Pet therapy can be used to treat hypertension and arrhythmia, and a heart attack and its consequences.

And research carried out in the United States at the end of the twentieth century showed that in seventy old people’s homes where pets were allowed, elderly people who had been suffering from depression and had not wanted to talk to anybody at all changed their whole way of life as they cared for the animals: they grew active and struck up friendships even with those residents they had never spoken to before.

Having animals in the house is, of course, an excellent way of preventing many serious ailments. Cats, for example, can bring down blood pressure and cure colds and a great many other complaints.

As for children and animals, that is a subject of its own, because there is now indisputable evidence of the good that pets do children. Striking results have been obtained from watching animals with children who suffer from various mental disorders and serious illnesses.

It has now been shown that in a family with pets the children are noticeably healthier and have a better immune system. Such children are also, as a rule, emotionally balanced.

Interestingly, having animals in the house prevents children from developing allergies and bronchial asthma: according to research, children growing up in a house with animals develop an immunity from the first days of life to allergies to fur, house dust and plant pollen. But to return to pet therapy... Can it help anybody at all? Scientists and doctors who study the question seriously believe that the success of treatment with animals depends above all on the relationship that forms between the pet and its owner. If a person does not like animals or is afraid of them, then pet therapy is out of the question.

What pet therapy needs in order to succeed is that the patient’s health and needs be taken into account when the pet is chosen, that the animal’s own health be watched constantly, and that its owner feel positively towards it.

Information taken from D. V. Nesterov’s book “Cat Therapy. The Furry Medicine”