Creative Arts in Therapy

I have a client with fairly severe developmental disabilities. He is in a wheelchair, has no functional communication skills, and limited functional use of his hands. His cognitive abilities are difficult to determine, due to his inability to communicate. So after completing his assessment for music therapy services, I determined that my primary goals would [...]

So how does music relieve pain?  Despite conducting research on this very subject, I cannot give you an exact answer.  Yet, the results of my studies points in two different ways music can impact how much pain we feel.
To understand how music affects pain, we must first explore pain.  Pain is multidimensional.  The first is [...]

As a hospice clinician, I frequently walk into the rooms of comatose patients and find music being played (by CD player or other device).  More often than not, this music is too loud, too stimulating/too varied in dynamic changes, and/or too incongruent with the patient’s musical preferences.  This scenario is always a problem because it [...]

Deaf individuals can enjoy music.  One of my Deaf friends is an accomplished drummer.  Another is a professional dancer.
Yet another is a Broadway actor and certified Deaf interpreter for Broadway musicals.
As a music therapist, I worked with young deaf children in a therapeutic preschool class along with hearing children
of Deaf parents. The deaf children in [...]