Art for pain

I have stayed in a hotel which served the best tom yum but which looked like a hospital. It was painted gray inside and out, without a whisper of art in the rooms or in the corridors. It made me feel like I was staying in a hospital that every time hotel staff would knock on my door, I had a fleeting thought that they were medical crew coming to get my blood. But come to think of it, whoever thought that hospitals should be aesthetically sterile? Is there a scientific finding that even links the traditional gray color of hospitals and the well-being of its patients? Does disease attract color that hospitals do away with it with such passion and consistency? Yes, there are now hospitals, especially the big prestigious hospitals that look like hotels, but most hospitals in the country still look like dull concrete boxes, inside and out, for the infirmed and the ailing. Finally, I have come across a study that may give some impetus to hospital administrators to consider putting some art in their premises as part of their patient care.

In a study published in the journal Consciousness and Cognition last July, and also reported in New Scientist last Sept. 18 in an article entitled “In pain? Take one masterpiece, three times a day,” the researchers showed how pain registered a lot less for people who were looking at paintings that the subjects themselves found beautiful. And since beauty is subjective, they first asked the subjects to pick 20 from 300 choices, the paintings they found “beautiful” and “ugly” and then shot a laser pulse to their hands which gave the subjects a “pricking sensation.” The patients who were looking at paintings that they themselves found beautiful registered much less pain than those who were looking at paintings that they judged “ugly.” They knew this because scientists know where the brain lights up when we experience pain. So they hooked the skulls of the subjects to measure their brain activity in that “pain” spot.

Dr. Marina de Tommaso of the University of Bari in Italy, the lead researcher of the study, acknowledged in New Scientist that there are other “distractions” that could lessen our perception of pain but she said that this is the first one that identified “beauty” as one of these “distractions.”

I personally asked myself how we could have missed it. How could we have missed the role of “beauty” in easing physical pain when it is well-known and scientifically documented that works of art affect our emotional state? In my past conversations with neurologist Dr. Joven Cuanang, he has spoken about patients with brain injuries, from accident or stroke, whose engagement with art has forged new connections in their brains that help them heal. So yes, science has found that art, which is sometimes thought of as “useless” and a “luxury,” resonates with our own capacity to heal or ease our own suffering. This study reveals that when we visit family and friends in physical pain, maybe we should also bring pieces of beauty to share with them. And if you really know the person whose pain you want to ease, you would have an idea of what these “beautiful” things are.

And when you get to the hospital, you may also want to think twice before you tell the patient you are visiting to simply think positive so that everything will be alright. While there are many things that can adversely affect the path to recovery of any patient, many diseases are not that simple and the power of your own mind may not be the only power you need to heal. I came across an article in Livescience entitled “The Power of Positive Thinking: Truth or Myth” by Maggie Koerth-Baker. It did cite studies, particularly one done by scientists in the Ben-Gurion University in the journal BMC Cancer last August that revealed that diseases like breast cancer seem to most likely occur to women who have suffered what they called serious “life challenges”like death in the family or divorce, than those who have led “stable, happy lives.” That does not mean a cause and effect between experiencing “divorce” and “breast cancer.” That is what may be misleading about this finding. As far as I know, no scientific study has yet explained the physiological pathways between emotional suffering and the birth of cancer cells in ones’ breasts.

While there are many conditions set in motion by your emotional state that could contribute to an illness, disease is a more complicated animal than that. Remember, there are also so many organisms inside your body that it is valid to ask yourself if you really completely own your own body. For every self-help book that espouses that you are the master of your own body, there are thousands of organisms which have appointed your body as their residence, village and country. Some of them are “good” for your survival and some are “bad.” Try to control that, by yourself, with simply happy thoughts.

If you are a grumpy person for any reason and find yourself angry that you got sick, you may find it difficult at first to accept the regimen assigned by your doctors. That is what could delay your recovery. However, it is no assurance that thinking positively bails you out from getting the ticket to doom. From my experience, thinking positively helps the “caregivers” cope more than it helps the patient recover. I can also tell you from personal experience that the worse thing that you can inflict on a loved one in pain is to deprive him/her of his/her own feelings, unhappy though they may be. There are no conclusive links in scientific studies between happy positive thoughts and recovering from a disease.

But so what? This is like being told to be good so that you will earn points for the afterlife. Is it really such an empty worthless life to just be good and love life or at least try the best way you can, without thinking of the rewards of eternal retirement? And in art, why do we need evidence to prove that a thing of beauty is a joy forever or in this case, a pain reliever, before we consider surrounding those who ail, some beautiful pieces by masterful hands? Is it so horrible or at the very least, silly, to show “beautiful” works of art to a loved one in pain? I think the same way about thinking positively — even if it will not help you cure yourself of cancer. If you think positively when you want to, without being forced to, then by all means, I think you should charge every waking moment of your life with it. Even if you do not recover, what would you have really lost? 

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