March 5, 2015: Directed Bake Off: Art Therapy Continued.

         A picture is nothing but a bridge between the soul of the artist and that of the spectator. (Eugene Delacroix)

     Since Lori did such a good job last week of telling us about her field of study and work, and since I read some desire within the group to have more time to discuss the vast information that she presented, I decided to make this Bake Off a so-called directed Bake Off in order to provide a chance to expand our consideration of art therapy and empathy.

     Lori and several members of our group clarified that Art Therapy primarily draws out the client. It is using art to bring out a narrative, a story, from that client and then moves further by interacting with the art.

     Lori studies at Mount Mary College which is one of only 60 programs in Art Therapy. 

     Paul mentioned that one could ask "How does it feel to be in that picture?" and this question might succeed in drawing out the client. He described one patient of his who had Ashberger's Syndrome and always drew himself as a locomotive. He could not see the need to study math or other subjects, but this identification that he had with train locomotives could be used to help him with his math homework by framing what he had to learn in the language or examples of math calculations.

     One member asked Lori if the colors of the art work used or drawn by the client had any significance. We recently had a presentation on color therapy and learned how colors do play a role in people's moods and may even have beneficial or curative influences. Lori answered that the use of color by clients is often subtle. Bright colors are not always positive and vice versa. The actual nature of the drawing tells us more. For example one client might show an explosion and even though it was drawn with bright colors, the nature of this depicted explosion showed the chaos in his life. Therefore, a client uses certain colors but it may not be a conscious choice and those colors may not have the meaning you would think.

     Another member asked if anyone had heard of the Luscher color test. This is a psychological test invented by Dr. Max Lusher in Basel, Switzerland. Dr. Luscher believed that sensory perception of color is objective and shared by all but that color preferences are subjective and that these subjective states can be measured by using test colors. Luscher believed that color selections which are guided unconsciously, they reveal the person as they really are and not as they would like to be perceived or as they may falsely perceive themselves. Luscher developed a list of meanings of certain test colors and used these to analyze clients. The results of this color test have not been scientifically proven and most people fell it is not valid. There was some testing done trying to compare the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory which is regarded as an effective testing device with the Luscher Color Test and there weas no significant agreement between the two test results.

     Paul commented that when he is treating chronic pain, he asks the patient to answer several questions about the nature of their pain: How big is it? What shape is it? Where is the pain? And what color is the pain? As treatment of the pain progresses, one does not have to get into interpreting the color, but the therapist can see if treatment is changing the color of the pain. You are not specifically trying to change one color to another but it does change so that you can see some effect of the therapy.

     Mark spent some time describing what he does in his work with neurofeedback. He described that people that come to see him for neurofeedback treatment have had lots of treatments. They have seen a lot of doctors, had consults, medications, and various behavioral therapies. In other words, almost everything has been tried. but what he does is like art therapy, in that it is non invasive. By invasive he means that it does not alter the body's neurochemistry as medications do, nor apply shock therapy or involve invasive procedures. Briefly he described neurofeedback as using technology to mirror the state of consciousness back to the client using audio and visual feedback. Really the brain's activity is shown to the patient through varying sound and visual graphs or spikes. Some members expressed an interest in learning more about these techniques from Mark so that this might be a future program.  
      

January 22, 2015: Color Therapy by Mary R.

          Mary R., a regular attendee, at our meetings is a nurse who now practices acupuncture. She has been training herself in auricular acupuncture or auricular therapy, and has been trying to earn a certification in this area of treatment. But recently she became interested in color therapy. Mary was able to do some research from several books in order to present to us a summary of color therapy. These books were: 1) Discover Color Therapy: A First Step Handbook to Better Health by Helen Graham; 2) Colour Therapy: the Use of Colour for Health and Healing by Pauline Wills; and The Secret language of Color by Joann Eckstut and Arielle Eckstut.

     Mary related to us some of the fascinating things she learned about color, starting with how we see color with the eye and its rods and cones. She was surprised to learn that under water the number of colors visible gradually declines. For example at 30 feet below sea level, one can see yellow and blue, but as one goes deeper, only blue can be seen. Surprisingly a peacock shrimp has the most color receptors in its eyes. And yet human beings can see 10 million shades of color. Nocturnal animals have fewer photo receptors. Bats see only shades of grey, and no color. Dogs can't see green and red, but only in the yellow and blue range. To them grass is probably blue. Butterflies have more photo receptors than humans. Birds see all the colors but less so for blue. Snakes can see infra red.

     Color used as therapy is often called chromotherapy. It is thought that healing with color depends on the vibrational energy of the light waves in the various colors. In this practice, the New Agers utilize the chakras from ancient Hindu tradition but the New Age has applied colors to these chakras and this combination of color and traditional chakra practice are used together. 

     In color therapy, an analysis is done sometimes with a so called dousing utensil to determine what color a patient or client might need to improve their situation. Then the color that is needed is applied to the skin, sometimes over the wrist. This color's complementary color is also used. Sometimes colored silk is used and applied to the skin. Some therapist use a round lantern slide through which a light is passed. Those who write about color therapy state that the client's pulse responds to the colors that are correct for a person's therapy. There are also general rules for using color as therapy by these alternative practitioners. Red is the most commonly used. Orange seems to treat depression, gallbladder stones and muscle cramps. Green is used for detoxification, infection. Turquoise boosts the immune system. A typical prescription advises which colors to use and instructs the client to hold the color to the wrist under a light bulb, 2 times a day for perhaps 15 minutes for a period of 3 months.

     It should be noted that the use of color therapy or chromotherapy as it is sometimes called is a pseudoscience. There is no evidence of the type that medicine usually uses, for example double blind studies that show that any of these uses of color do anything to heal or treat disease. However, interior decorators have long thought that certain colors in our environment whether paint on the wall or rug on the floor or bursts of bright color within a more neutral room can have varying degrees of affect on emotions, state of relaxation or anxiety, and mood.

     The author questioned what the expectations of clients of color therapy were. I postulated that perhaps some of these clients are frustrated and have tried multiple different therapies without satisfaction. They may expect that some of the alternative types of treatment may have an effect. We also know that the so called placebo affect is very real and can be very strong. It is estimated that 30 to 40% of people can be subject to a relatively strong placebo affect.  John commented that studies have shown that people have a remarkable ability to self heal. A study suggested that healing of a medical problem starts even before the patient sees the doctor, once the patient has made the decision to seek care, suggesting that the patient starts to get better when they have given themselves permission to let self healing take place. As an MD, my view is that as long as alternative therapies do not hinder or delay standard medical treatment, there is no preclusion to using them. In other words if they help without side affects, let's use them. Of course the problem with any of these alternative treatment modalities which are unproven is the presence of charlatans who can do great harm of a financial kind as well as emotional damage. There is a need for careful scientific blinded studies to learn more about colors to justify the use of an alternative treatment like color therapy.

     Some members of the audience suggested that the use and success of these alternative therapies depends on perception. Indeed all our brains confabulate to make up for lacks in our sensory organs and their ability to perceive the world. Vision for example has been studied in detail and the presence of this confabulation in our brain to make up for imperfect and incomplete visualizations of the visual field has been proven.

     With further questioning, Mary did briefly talk about auricular therapy which she is trying to learn at this time. Briefly this is the application of needles or in some cases glass or metal rods to areas of the ear which correspond to ailing areas of the entire human body. Again I am not sure of the evidence for this type of treatment either, though traditional Chinese acupuncture seems to have some benefit for many people, though that benefit is poorly understood.

     Mary led us in an exercise during which we first practiced some guided relaxation techniques. Then we were asked to imagine a butterfly and to concentrate on its colors, then to imagine it flying to a place and to recall the color or colors of that place. Mary then said that the books she studied gave interpretations of the colors seen in this imagination exercise. Mary admitted that in the first case she did not like the predictions as applied to herself. She did not think that they applied well to her. In a second similar exercise she felt more accepting of the resultant interpretations.

     In my own research, I did find this Internet site. If you are interested in a much more thorough consideration of chromotherapy, access this site from the Journal of Evidence Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine.

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1297510/


     In addition, a lot of research has been done in the last 2 decades about the affect of color on circadian rhythm and other physiological processes. I found this interesting article about research on blue light. As you can tell by perusing this site, a lot of complex research has been done in this area. Therefore it is not as far fetched to believe that other colors as well have affects on human behavior though perhaps not as intense an affect as blue.

 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2831986/