Art has long been recognised for the contribution it can make to patients' physical condition. Siobhán Long reports
Arguments about the interplay between art and health are virtually redundant these days, as anyone who has found more pain relief in Beethoven or Bjork than in aspirin will testify.
The Arts Council's decision to host a three-day conference entitled The Arts And Health Conference is timely. Focusing on four central themes - Knowing Spaces, Sensing The Non-Visual, Imagining The Body, and Narration and Time - Arts Council chairwoman Olive Braiden views the conference as "part of a longer term initiative to promote a policy-based approach to arts and health".
Braiden contends that "artists working within hospitals and other health environments are telling us that they are finding an important outlet for their work: the challenges of making art to high standards, in collaboration with many people and groups found within the hospital environment, pushes them to new levels of achievement".
Dr Austin O'Carroll, a general practitioner in Dublin's north inner city, runs a module on Film, Arts and Philosophy within the Royal College of Surgeons Training Scheme for General Practice. His conference paper, entitled The Art of Medicine: Hearing, Responding to, and Transforming the Patient's Narrative, describes his innovative approach to his work as a GP.
"We've made great strides through science," he says. "We've learned how to cure many cancers and so on, but the philosophy of science has left its mark. It suggests that we're all the same. If everybody is the same, then you can generalise scientific truths to everybody.
"As well as that, science makes this division between body and mind: the idea that if there's no physical pathology to correlate with the symptom, then it's a condition of the mind, as if the mind is something separate from the body, which somehow is viewed as less valid.
"But the mind allows us to think, but also to feel. We don't just feel with your head, you feel with your whole body, with your guts, your heart. Every single sensation and emotion comes through those."
O'Carroll casts a light on the art of medicine, that elusive quality that enables a doctor to diagnose, empower or simply empathise with his/her patients in a way which facilitates better health.
"I've come to the conclusion that every interaction is unique," he says. "Even with the same person. If this is so, then the scientific template doesn't work, and that's where the creativity comes in, in several ways. You have to be creative in how you hear the person's story. You have to be open to the person, and open to your own gut feeling, in order to be able to respond to that individual's needs. The art is in knowing how to respond, that's the creative spark."
O'Carroll's interest in melding film with medical education grew naturally out of his own personal experience as a film fan.
"I chose film because it catches you by surprise," he says. "It allows you to get at the emotion, the gut feeling. That's something that medical education normally distances you from. Film brings up issues in a human context. Mike Leigh's Secrets And Lies is a great film about family interaction, about how family secrets affect people and affect their health. It tackles illness in an holistic sense. So how it affects you as a person and then as a doctor can be very useful."
Prof Paul Robertson, leader of the Medici String Quartet and presenter of the Channel 4 series Music And The Mind, has spent more than two decades working with scientists to explore the neurological and scientific basis of music. His conference paper, The Swansongs Project, co-presented with Dr John Zeisel, explores the relationship between musical structure and the neurophysiology of Alzheimer's disease.
"The subjective experience of sound can be traced to areas of the brain whose structures are very old," he says. "Infants' response to music is incredibly sophisticated before birth, therefore it's a prime source of how we learn about who we are and how we respond to the outside environment. As we learn about the relationship between music and our brain, it actually provides a map of what it is to be human that lies beneath or before language."
Current estimates suggest that there are 25 million sufferers of Alzheimer's disease in the West, equal to the population of Canada. This represents a pandemic about which there is almost total ignorance, according to Robertson.
"As Alzheimer's disease progresses," Robertson explains, "some of the severest emotional pain comes from the fact that families and carers have great difficulty coping with the changed person whom they've known and loved.
"The memory remains, but the access to it is denied. Music is a powerful way of accessing that memory because it uses a different set of keys which are non-verbal.
"Music is usually the last one to go in Alzheimer's. So we've created a musical narrative which uses common rules which we all understand whether sub-consciously or consciously.
"We illustrate through the way the syntax of music breaks down, what is actually happening with the disease itself. This gives us some understanding of how to respond and support an individual or a family in dealing with the disease and its impact on relationships."