ART FOR HEALTH’S SAKE
Patients’ lives improved through dance, music and humour,
It’s the most graceful pirouette Rachel Bar ever performed.
When her prima ballerina dreams began to fade eight years ago, she spun her talents onto a more elevated stage.
“I just felt like there was more to me . . . more to say,” she recalls. “And I didn’t think I was going to be able to say that through my performing.”
Bar now offers dance therapy to people with Parkinson’s disease in the GTA.
Bar, 31, who danced for six years with major British and Israeli companies, is coupling her dance therapy instruction with a scientific study of Parkinson’s.
In doing so, she has become a key partner in a three-year effort to carve out a permanent place for the arts in the province’s health system.
Led by the University Health Network’s Open Lab centre, the Art Heals Health project is bringing together disparate artists who work in medical settings and display the clinical value they add to patient care, at relatively low costs.
Ultimately the project hopes to help long-term provincial funding for the arts as therapeutic tools, says Kendra Delicaet, managing director of Open Lab, which studies and bolsters creative programs to improve the delivery and patient experience of health care.
The project, one of about a dozen the centre is running, is recruiting dancers, painters, musicians, actors and comics who are currently taking their talents into hospital and outpatient settings.
About 170 artists, therapists and clinicians from across the province and beyond attended an initial project symposium last fall. The program co-ordinated by Open Lab hasn’t yet costed out the three-year project.
The notion that art can improve medical outcomes is not new. But an increasing number of large studies support the idea, says Dr. Luis Fornazzari, a neurologist at St. Michael’s Hospital and a medical adviser to the Open Lab project.
“There are many articles that are pointing to the very good effects of art,” he says. “Heart attacks, ICU patients, patients admitted (for) bypass coronary artery diseases and other big surgeries . . . they respond much, much better.”
These responses, Fornazzari says, include lower use of painkillers and shortened hospital stays, cutting costs and helping the arguments for artistic interventions.
Just why art can lead to truncated, less painful recoveries and other physiological benefits is unclear, he says. But it’s likely due in part to positive effects of the neurochemicals, such as opioids and dopamine, released during participation in artistic activities.
Fornazzari’s own work has looked primarily at the protective effects that art offers the brain against the onset of dementias. Artists, in particular, are significantly “protected by their art,” sometimes for years, against the cognitive deteriorations caused by Alzheimer’s disease, strokes and other brain disorders, his research has shown.
Bar is completing a doctorate in clinical psychology at Ryerson University. And she has enlisted some of her dance class participants in a research project exploring the effects of dance on a Parkinson’s brain.
“We know that balance and gait and posture . . . do improve, and overall that dance can actually delay the progression of the disease,” she said after a recent class at Canada’s National Ballet School.
“Our research looks at . . . what’s unique about dance in the brain that facilitates these benefits,” added Bar, a graduate of the Jarvis St. school. (She also teaches adult and children’s programs there.)
Bar and her research colleague — York University neuroscientist Joseph DeSouza — use electroencephalograms (EEGs) to search for differences in dancers’ brain waves before and after classes.
They’ve also used functional MRI scans to look at neurological changes that occur in real time during the dance.
Some 36 weeks pregnant with her second child, Bar left much of the actual instruction during the recent class to a pair of ballet school dancers, who led 18 Parkinson’s patients through a series of sitting and standing moves in one of the facility’s elegant pastel studios.
The ballet school program, with 30 registrants with Parkinson’s each term, partners with the group Dancing With Parkinson’s, which runs classes in five other locations across the city.
Bill Bartlett dances three times a week at several of them. The gregarious, barrel-chested 71-year-old quit his career as a chef when he developed significant symptoms of the degenerative movement disorder four years ago. Like many who use art as therapy, Bartlett says ballet has drawn him out of the isolation in which illness can imprison a mind.
“Many people with Parkinson’s withdraw (but this) energizes me every day,” he says. “It gives me something to look forward to, to defer depression.”
Bar, whose favourite ballets to perform were Sleeping Beauty and Swan Lake, says the use of dance in her academic work flowed naturally from her former career. Bar and Fornazzari believe benefits they’ve documented — physiological, emotional, spiritual and economic — have earned the ancient arts a firm place in modern medicine.
But she notes the medical community relies on hard data to justify change. She and the other artists working in the program hope to supply just that.