Creative Healing: How Anyone Can Use Art, Writing, Music, and Dance to Heal Body and Soul

by Michael Samuels and Mary Rockwood Lane

Book Overview

All across the country, a groundbreaking movement is forming in the field of health care: art and medicine are becoming one, with remarkable results. In major medical centers such as the University of... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0062515187
• ISBN13: 9780062515186
• Release Date: January 1998
• Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
• Length: 289 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 7.4" x 9.2"

Customer Reviews

It Helped Me to Think Outside the Box!

Personally, I liked this book. It helped me to think outside the box in all kinds of new and exciting ways. Maybe this idea of creative healing doesn't cure cancer or other diseases, but what I see that it does do is to heal my emotions on a day-to-day basis when I engage in putting my creative juices to work. And for me, that was a huge significant part of my learning curve in my healing from my numerous health ailments. And now I hope to share this creativity with others, so that maybe someone else might feel at least a little less burdened by their diseases as I have.

A nightingale finds its voice

Many thanks to the authors for helping me to tap into my boundless creative energy and thus tackle my morbid obesity. My poundage has remained pretty static but at least I have been able to detract from it by holding my friends and family spellbound with my beautifully crafted semi-autobiographical free-verse epic poems and impressed by my congealed lamb fat sculptures. Thank you Mr Samuels for allowing my spirit to soar.

Creative Healing shows you how to use art for healing.

As one of the artists with Shands Arts in Medicine, the pioneering program discussed in Creative Healing, I feel compelled to respond to some of the reviews that have appeared here. While the Shands AIM program is certainly not the first, it is one of the most comprehensive programs in the country. We have had hundreds of artists volunteer their time over the years.Authors Samuels and Lane advocate art as an adjunct to medical care; they encourage sterile, dry, humorless medical institutions to add to their ranks those people whose only task is help patients express their pain, sadness, wishes, joy, anxiety, happiness, or fear, not from any clinical base, but from a human, craetive space.I work with patients on a regular basis, and I see how patients and families are eager to have us enter their rooms. How much joy is expressed when we encourage them to sing, dance, draw, paint, tell stories, write poetry. They are eager to participate, to make art, to dance from wheel chairs, and squish paint together between pieces of colored paper, to write poetry. You have only to read the messages on the tile wall in the lobby and the healing ceiling tiles to know how important simple creative acts are to people with life-threatening illness.Nurses and doctors invite us to visit particular patients. We offer creative breaks for hospital staff and welcome diversions for patient's families who spend long hours in the hospital often far away from home.These stories may seem unbelievable, but I see amazing things happen every day I am at the hospital. Is it too good to be true? Nope. The synergy of art and healing is a surprise for anyone who embarks on the effort, not as a job, but as a gift.Rather than laying claim to a concept, Lane and Samuels are spreading the word. It is past time for hospitals and medical institutions to integrate art into the healing environment. Healing is more than a result of medical attention, it's a result of attention to the whole body, mind, and spirit.As far as the! comments about erroneous anthropology, one as only to read the great controversies within that discipline itself to know that there are already a variety of opinions on the subject. Science is even beginning to rethink evolution! And what about those flying dinosaurs? I think the past is open to speculation and I support those who are creative enough to view the world with an open mind.Creative Healing has a wealth of information about creating personal art and about bringing art into medical settings. It's a do-it-yourself manual, complete with exercises, ideas, and experiences. I applaud the authors' efforts and look forward to hearing stories from other writers who have pioneered these concepts. The more that is written, the more likely those in charge of planning and designing hosptials will realize that an art room is as important as an operating room.