Healing Through Creative Expression
Our Integrative and Creative Arts Therapy (ICAT) groups are here to help you find new avenues for managing symptoms related to your cancer diagnosis. When you're ready to explore and embrace unique ways of coping, let our credentialed art and music therapists lead the way. No previous experience or skill is required.
The ICAT groups are held in person. For more information about the services we provide, please email us at
CFD-S.ICAT@AdventHealth.com or call our local offices
(Orlando: 407-303-5685; Celebration: 407-303-4000 ext. 7150).
How to Heal Through Art and Music Therapy
The use of music and art to treat the emotional, physical and social health of cancer patients represents the essence of AdventHealth’s whole-person approach to medicine. Let’s find out how with some answers to your questions about this special type of therapy.
-
Q:Question: How can creativity build trust?
A:Answer:At the center of art and music therapy is the individual relationship therapists form with their patients. The arts help patients connect on a personal level as they tend to find comfort in the predictable familiarity of music and art, allowing that sense of ease to reach them during cancer treatment. It also creates strong bonds based on trust that are therapeutic themselves and guide their care at all levels.
-
Q:Question: How do art and science work together in this type of therapy?
A:Answer:In addition to being guided by a patient’s experience and preferences, the creative arts therapies are tailored to their illness and symptoms. Art and music therapists are credentialed professionals, and evidence is growing that art and music do more than make us feel momentarily happy. They appear to accomplish this by taking advantage of the body’s own capacity to heal and feel good, including through the release of natural endorphins. Studies about the effect of music therapy on cancer patients found that it may have a beneficial effect on anxiety, pain, fatigue, heart rate, respiratory rate and blood pressure.
-
Q:Question: Who is art and music therapy for?
A:Answer:You don’t have to be an artist or a musician to benefit from these therapies. An art or music therapist taps into a universal human need to express oneself. Especially for people dealing with health issues that make it difficult to communicate, art and music can be a vehicle to express each person’s sense of creativity. Your therapist will meet you where you are — physically, emotionally and spiritually — to provide the highest level of healing possible.