(CNN) -- When 3-year-old Rowan Isaacson darted away from his father and dived into a herd of grazing horses, it easily could have been the end of the small autistic boy. He was babbling under the hooves of a boss mare.





Rupert Isaacson says he noticed immediate improvement in his son's language skills when he started riding.





"I thought he was going to get trampled," recalled Rupert Isaacson, Rowan's father.





But the horse, Betsy, dipped her head and chewed with her mouth in submission. Isaacson, who had trained horses for a living, had never seen it happen so spontaneously. Rowan had seemingly made a connection.





The Austin, Texas, family had been struggling with Rowan.





His wild tantrums were nearly driving Isaacson and his wife, Kristin Neff, to divorce. All the while, little Rowan was becoming unreachable.





"He would just stare off into space," Isaacson said. "I was worried it was going to get progressively worse and that eventually, he might float away from us entirely. Luckily, right about that time is when he met Betsy."





Isaacson began riding Betsy, a neighbor's horse, with Rowan. He says he noticed immediate improvement in his son's language skills.  Watch Rowan and Betsy »





"He would start to answer. He would start to talk. We would do song games up there on the saddle. I would take books up there in the saddle," Isaacson said.





Autism specialists say that horse riding can be effective in gaining access to autistic children.





Experts make a distinction between the kind of recreational therapeutic riding Isaacson was using with Rowan and hippotherapy, which is a medical treatment that uses horses and is supervised by a licensed speech-language pathologist.





"People perceive it's the interaction with the horse that's making the change. However, the movement of the horse is extremely powerful, and it's that movement that's having neurological impact on the autistic child," said Ruth Dismuke-Blakely, a speech-language pathologist and hippotherapy clinical specialist in Edgewood, New Mexico.





According to preliminary analysis of an ongoing study by Dismuke-Blakely, hippotherapy has been shown to increase verbal communication skills in some autistic children in as little as 18 to 25 minutes of riding once a week for eight weeks.





"We see their arousal and affect change. They become more responsive to cues. If they are at a point where they are using verbal cues, you get more words," Dismuke-Blakely said. "It's almost like it opens them up. It gives us access."





She cautions that a horse's movements can be powerful. For some autistic children, riding too long can overstimulate their nervous system, leading to more erratic behavior.





On Betsy, Rowan was at ease. After about three weeks, Isaacson says, Rowan's improved behavior was translating into the home and outside world as well.





But not consistently.





In late 2004, Isaacson, a human rights activist, brought a delegation of African bushmen from Botswana to the United Nations. Among the men were traditional healers, who offered to work with Rowan.





Isaacson says he was skeptical, but he had experience with the bushmen and allowed the healers to lay their hands on his son.





"I was kind of flabbergasted at Rowan's response. For about four days while they were with him, he started to lose some of his symptoms. He started to point, which was a milestone he hadn't achieved," Isaacson said.





When the tribal healers left, Rowan regressed.





Isaacson says he couldn't help but wonder what would happen if he were to give Rowan a longer exposure to the two things that he seemed to have responded well to: horses and shamans.





"I know it sounds completely crazy," he said. "I just had a gut feeling."





Isaacson took his wife and son to Mongolia.





"It's the oldest horse culture on the planet. Everyone still gets around on a horse there -- so
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