Behavioral healthcare patients at the Malcom Randall VA Medical Center in Gainesville, Fla., have the chance to participate in a new form of therapy through the hospital's Telehealth Creative Arts Therapy program, KPBS News reports.
1. Hundreds of patients have enrolled in the Telehealth Creative Arts Therapy program, which connects veterans with music, movement and visual arts therapy in their own homes through video consultations.
2. Music therapist Diane Garrison Langston, for example, is able to aid one of her patients with post-traumatic stress disorder and a traumatic brain injury through remote 50-minute guitar sessions.
"Not only is [guitar] great for finding gross motor movement because you have to strum … it's positive cognitive processing because [patients are] learning a new language," she told KPBS News.
3. Chuck Levy, MD, serves as chief of the physical medicine and rehabilitation service at the North Florida/South Georgia Veterans Health System — which operates the Malcom Randall VA Medical Center — and oversees the Telehealth Creative Arts Therapy program in Gainesville. He acknowledged there is mixed evidence on various types of art therapy.
"There are some indicators that different engagements in arts can lower your blood pressure and can be good for your heart rate," Dr. Levy told KPBS News. "I would say that the body of evidence [for creative arts therapy] is thinner than it is for other practices … but we need to be doing things now, so off we go."
4. The Telehealth Creative Arts Therapy program plans to expand to 10 U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs locations nationwide through a five-year grant the Malcom Randall VA Medical Center received to mentor other organizations interested in deploying the program.