Art Is Becoming a Medical Treatment

The arts, research finds, have benefits for everyone, not just those who have medical conditions. A recent study, for example, found that 15-minute mindfulness exercises in museums reduced anxiety and improved mental well-being among non-clinical visitors.

In a review of 95 studies of programs across 27 countries, Sonke and fellow researchers found that arts initiatives may reduce the risk of noncommunicable diseases, which account for 74 percent of preventable deaths worldwide. Arts programs, she explains, can facilitate greater understanding around systemic barriers to health resources. They can lead people to engage in healthier behaviors, like movement through dance. They also reduce social isolation, which is linked to poor health outcomes.

Meanwhile, evidence is showing how effective arts interventions are for specific conditions. Dance classes like the ones in Colorado, for instance, have been found to improve participants’ gaits after the class ends. A singing program for new mothers with postpartum depression found participants ultimately showed lower levels of depression and improved well-being.

“We would never say that the arts can replace medication or medical treatment,” Sonke says, but “they really can be an important complement and adjunct and partner to medical treatment.”

Sonke, a dancer, saw that effect firsthand early in her career when she was an artist in residence at University of Florida Health, which, at the time, was one of a handful of U.S. hospitals with an arts program. She worked with one young patient with sickle cell disease, for whom dancing proved to be so effective in managing pain crises that her doctor made a note on her chart that dancing was more effective than medication.

UF Health isn’t alone — today, about half of U.S. hospitals have some kind of arts program. But UF Health has uniquely interwoven its arts program with its medical practice. Through the hospital’s chart system, doctors and nurses make referrals to UF Health Shands Arts in Medicine, which includes a roster of in-house artists who are on the hospital payroll. In 2025, practitioners with the program had 13,000 arts engagements with the health system’s patients, ranging from dance classes for expecting mothers in high-risk pregnancies, to painting or making mosaics with young patients. Last year, sickle cell patients recorded and released an album.

While every practitioner has expertise in their own discipline, part of the efficacy, explains program director Jenny Baxley Lee, is that artists work with patients outside of their specialties. One cultural challenge, she says, is that many people feel reluctant to try something artistic if they aren’t good at it. But artists help them take incremental steps to explore creativity, which can help achieve self-transcendence, a psychological state that can lead to feelings of greater meaning and connection.

“It’s about knowing the craft of facilitating the arts practice in a way that leads to a potential flow state,” she says.

Advocates say benefits can come by improving accessibility to arts and creativity throughout communities, like in schools. While programs linking arts and health have taken root in communities for years, efforts are now growing to strengthen and build out a more coordinated approach.

 In Palm Beach County, Florida, artists, health care providers, researchers, local officials and others have been coming together to build out arts programs to support youth mental health and creative aging. In Kansas City, a similar mélange of local stakeholders has been working on approaches to social prescribing.

These collaborative groups organized as pilots in a model called Community Neuroarts Coalitions. Launched in 2022 as a project of Johns Hopkins University and the Aspen Institute, the approach sought to bring together a diverse mix of people to build out arts programs already underway and develop new ones, all while promoting evidence-based practices and adding to the growing body of research.

“They’re all hyperlocal, they all are addressing problems in their communities, and they’re doing it through a systematic process that results in very different outcomes,” says Susan Magsamen, director of the International Arts + Mind Lab at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, which is coordinating the network with the Aspen Institute. 

Late last year, the network expanded to 11 coalitions across the country, with plans to replicate the model in more communities globally.

Magsamen believes the interest reflects a growing recognition of the importance of the arts. The arts are often rarified, she says, but in fact, creativity is affordable, accessible and indispensable. “These integrated arts, which seem soft, that seem like a ‘nice to have,’ turned out to be essential,” she says.

Nigerian artist Kunle Adewale, who first began bringing his art experience to medical settings about 15 years ago, sees silos as one of the biggest challenges to growing the connection between arts and health. 

Adewale, now based in the U.K., coordinates the Global Arts in Medicine Fellowship, which recruits artists, health workers and others from around the world. Participants build relationships across borders, learn skills to help get funding and resources, and develop strategies to build more support in their countries around arts and health.

“You have moved from working with patients to now working with policymakers,” Adewale says.

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One program that grew out of the fellowship was a National Arts and Health Week in Egypt in 2024 that spanned three cities and attracted more than 600 Egyptian doctors, mental health professionals, artists, social workers and more.

Rania El-Desouki, who organized the event, says that many people have been doing interesting work around arts and health across the country, but all too often these initiatives are isolated. Through the week and her work since, she’s found many people with medical and arts backgrounds are very open to expanding arts and health programming.

“It’s still like a drop in the sea,” she says, “and we still need more and more.”

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