Healing Arts
Celebrating the Visions and Voices of the Arts

(From SEP/OCT 2005 ParentGuide)

Art nurtures the spirit, which in turn, can help heal the body.

Like prayer or meditation, art soothes and relaxes. It carries human beings inward, far from the stressors of their world and deep into their souls. Just hearing music or viewing a performance can lift the downtrodden, comfort those who ache and writhe in pain, and bring a smile to the face of an anxious worried relative.

More and more, hospitals and traditional medical facilities are embracing the arts as valuable tools for healing, accepting the reality that ministering to the spirit is as therapeutic as ministering to the physical body. Locally, Ruth Eckerd Hall and Morton Plant Mease Hospital have collaborated to bring the arts and healing to patients.

“Music can relieve stress and relieving stress can aid in healing,” notes Bob Franki who plays classical music regularly at the local hospitals with his wife, Claire, and their seven year-old daughter, Nicole. In fact, music and art have been shown to do more than just relieve stress. Research and observations suggest that exposure to the arts can reduce pain, calm patients with dementia, assuage depression in Alzheimer’s patients, and even lower blood pressure. The Arts as a Healing Force Web site (www.artsashealing.org) suggests that a person ’s physiology and attitude are affected by art to the point that stress gives way to relaxation and fear gives way to creativity and inspiration.In essence, art changes brain wave patterns and affects the autonomic nervous system, hormonal balance, and the brain’s neurotransmitters, all for the better.

The effects of the arts on patients and family members can be profound. Classical guitarist, Jon McIntyre was once asked to play for a man whose life support was being removed the next day. The experience convinced him of the healing power of music. “After I started playing, this man on full life support started swinging his feet to the exact beat of the music.” McIntyre also observed that the man ’s daughter, who remained by her father ’s side throughout the performance, was also moved.

Blair Holtey, Chaplain for Morton Plant Mease, musician, and hospital coordinator for the program, also believes strongly in the power of music to heal. “When I can go in and the patient doesn’t need pain medication because I played a song and put the patient to sleep, that ’s one less medicine in that patient’s body.” Holtey admits the music has been so beneficial to patients that he even had one patient take the guitar from him and start playing.

But sometimes it’s not just the patients who need the comfort and solace of art or music. Claire Franki notes that they’ve played in the hospital lobby for family members who’ve just received some bad news. “There was a man who asked, ‘Ma’am do you know this hymn … and we played it for him,” says Claire. Adds Bob, “He claims that we ministered to him ….He felt closer to God through the music we played for him.”

Emily Harris, a costume designer and puppeteer, visits hospitals with a finger puppet kit for children. She once shared her finger puppets with a young boy who got up out of bed and gave her a hug. She left him with the kit, as she does with all children, and before she finished visiting the rest of the children in the ward, the young boy had completed all the finger puppets. He’d decorated them, developed a new storyline
for them, and written a song. “I was so knocked out,” she recalls fondly.

Art isn’t just therapeutic for the patients and their families --the artists who share their gifts often receive tremendous personal rewards. Nicole Haumesser, Resident Theater Teaching Artist/PASSport Coordinator at Ruth Eckerd Hall says that when the program first started, “the artists gave their time for free …They got so much out of the experience.” Nationally known performance poet, Glenis Redmond has experienced many gifts from sharing her poetry and helping others heal through her art. “I get a connection to the world that allows me to fully be myself. I …get to be in the community and offer an alternative to the norm. I get to express my soul and have that validated. I get to help people walk in the direction of their own soul. I get the gift of being human. What I give, I get back 100 fold.”

To learn more about the Arts in Medicine program, including information about the participating artists, contact Nicole Haumesser at Ruth Eckerd Hall at 727-712-2714.