This summer, the non-profit Miami Dance Project has been using music and movement to reach and teach children with autism. For the past six weeks, a special dance therapy camp has been taking place at New Image Dance Studio in Kendall. Barbara Delgado has been running the studio for 12 years. While there are many [...]

Writing for the journal, Minnesota Medicine, Gary Christenson, M. D. explains, “Why we need the arts in medicine:” 1. Studying the arts makes medical students into better doctors. 2. The arts have therapeutic benefits. 3. The arts can help prevent disease. 4. The arts can improve the patient experience. 5. The arts can promote physician [...]

Writing for the Huffington Post, Ronna Kaplan, M.A.President, American Music Therapy Association offers these answers: Music therapy means many different things to many different people, but common threads among definitions include the importance of music, relationships, developing clients’ or patients’ potentials and improving the quality of their lives. To me music therapy uses music prescriptively to [...]

Charles McGrath of the New York Times writes about conceptual artist, Alexander Melamid’s latest project that examines Art and Healing with distinctive playfulness, irony.  His new clinic called the Art Healing Ministry is “a storefront clinic at 98 Thompson Street in SoHo, where people can come in by appointment and be treated, by means of exposure to [...]

The Los Angeles Tmes reports on the use of visual arts to help treat and understand migraines: Increasingly, instead of struggling to explain with words, people with these illnesses are producing art that does a better job. The artists begin to feel less isolated and alone. Their doctors get a better understanding of the symptoms [...]

The Bigioni family is among the parents and children in York Region who have discovered the benefits of art therapy and art classes for children with special needs. “People are becoming more aware of art therapy, what it can do and how powerful it is,” said Janice LeBlanc, an art therapist with a private practice [...]

A report on arts in healthcare in Africa: The Society for the Arts in Healthcare, the University of Florida Centre for the Arts in Healthcare and the Rwanda Red Cross convened for a two day long East-Central Africa Arts & Health Forum, held on May 13th to 14th, 2011. The forum brought together several participants [...]

Today, the New York Times, Paula W. Chen, MD reports on published results of a new study in the Annals Of Internal Medicine that reveals the healing effects of story-telling on patients with high blood pressure.   “And it appears that at least for one group of patients, listening to personal narratives helped control high blood pressure as [...]

The Wall Street Journal reports that medical schools are teaching writing, art and literature to their students hoping to “turn out a new generation of physicians better able to listen attentively to patients, show emotion and provide sensitive personal care.” Read more here:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704680604576110240337491446.html?mod=rss_Health

Four studies done between 2001 and 2010 in Cleveland, Ohio’s MetroHealth’s burn unit show decreases in patients’ pain levels when they participated in music therapy before and during their dressing changes. “The results weren’t based just on the patients’ say-so, but on measurements of stress hormones, respiration and heart rates, and patients’ assessments of pain levels (that’s a standard [...]