Healing through dolphins

When I heard in the nineties that autistic children had to wait for a dolphin therapy in Florida for about 2 to 3 years, I thought that I could propose this therapy in Turkey, in Antalya. I immediately began to search and work. After ten years of hard work I was able to propose the therapy with dolphins in 2001 in Antalya in the frame of Soulscience School.
Not only families of autistic children showed interest in the therapy with dolphins. Also parents of children suffering of cerebral paralysis and parents of those who suffer of rare genetic syndromes where highly interested in having their children therapied by the dolphins. Children with traumatic experiences have participated in the program of the dolphin therapy thanks to the support of different organisations. We offer our work for a large spectrum of mental and physical handicaps. The success of our work has contributed greatly to the renown of this form of therapy and to the foundation of various other dolphin therapy centres as well in Turkey as abroad. The dolphin therapy lasts ten days. Every day (except Mondays) the children swim with the dolphins for half an hour. Afterwards they attend to the dolphin show. Doing this the children can learn to understand and are challenged that they can do more with these huge and powerful animals than simply swim. When the children see the dolphins painting, singing, playing with a ball, rolling around, doing somersaults and racing through the water, they feel that they can share much more activities with the dolphins. The bio-energy - the vital energy that the dolphin communicates to the child, improves the alertness, the awareness, the feeling of goodness, the interest of the child for the surrounding world and accelerates the learning process of the child from double to tenfold.
The patient experiences the positive benefit and the challenge of this ten day therapy up to one year. During this time the children learn much more than through private schooling or therapies they have attended. The dolphins and the children develop new relationships in which the feeling of acknowledgement and admiration are lived intensely, and a relation free of prejudice is built up. This relationship makes the children happy and gives them inner peace. The controlled work has proved that swimming with dolphins has a depression diminishing result. The hormones of happiness - the endorphins, increase. Positive developments in the brain through the Alpha waves start and the number of T cells that generate the anti corps and immoglobulines begin to work. Studies have shown that the ultrasound waves emitted by the dolphins even have the power to heal wounds.
The Behaviourism emphasises that swimming with dolphins is a big treat for children with specific needs and that this can be used to enforce the learning process. If one examines the transference/contrtransference between dolphin and child one can see that the dolphin therapy is a very interesting and efficient method of psychotherapy: One of the most eminent Psychiatrists of the 20th century, Dr. Carl Gustav Jung, emphasises that the confrontation with the luminosity of an archetype of a symbol has healing effects. The symbol of the dolphin comports many meanings and associations with mythology. The patient experiences the healing effect in the confrontation with this symbol during the dolphin therapy.
With the dolphin therapy progress is assured.

Murat Kemaloğlu, MD

Diagnoses of the Dolphin Therapy participants

ADHD (Attention Deficit Hyperacivity Disorder)
Agenesis of corpus Callosum
Angelman Syndrome
Anoxia
Aphasia
Autism
Behavioural Disorder
Cerebral Palsy
Chromosomal Disorder
Congenital Microcephaly
Crouzon Syndrome
Depression
Down Syndrome
Dysarthria
Dyslexia
Encephalitis
Epilepsy
Friedrich Ataxia
Gilles de la Tourette Syndrome
Incontinentia Pigmenti
Krabbe Disease
 

Landau-Kleffner Syndrome
Mental Retardation
Mucoploysaccharidoses
Myelodysplastic Syndrome
Optic Athropy
Otahara Syndrom
Paraplegia
Progressive myoklonic Epilepsy
Qudriplegia
Radioulnar Synostosis
Rett Syndrome
Ring Chromosom 22
Schizencephaly
Tay-Sachs-Syndrome
Williams Syndrome
Wolf-Hirschhorn Syndrome
Tar Syndrome
Trisomy 22
Posttraumatic Stress Syndrome
 

Patients who received dolphin therapy came from the following countries:

Austria
Cyprus
Denmark
England
Germany
Holland
Kazakhistan
Luxemburg
Lithuania
Latvia
Poland
Roumania
Russia
Scottland
Switzerland
Turkey
Ukrain
Uzbekistan

 

The benefits of Dolphin Therapy

Swimming with dolphins creates an effect that gives joy and peace of mind, enforces the immune system, improves awareness, attention and self-control and develops feelings of compassion and self-confidence. As the interest and curiosity for the outside world expands, the capacity to benefit from inter-personal relations improves radically.

Consequently, patients who recieve ergotherapy ,logopedy or physiotherapy will benefit from these treatments much faster and more thoroughly.

After the dolphin therapy, disabled children build a capacity to learn faster; in one or two months, they can acquire the knowledge and physical skills that will normally take them a year to learn. Dolphin therapy accelerates the learning process two to ten times the normal rate, and this improvement will be effective from six months up to a year.

It has been observed that a six-year-old autistic child went through the dolphin therapy and received special tutoring and therapies for a year; he got rid of all autistic symptoms and when he came back for the dolphin therapy the following year, no autistic traits were observed.