Health Disclaimer

The most important line on this page is not the usual one, so it goes first.

Nothing here is a reason to stop anything

Nothing on this site is a reason to stop, reduce, postpone or skip any treatment, medicine, therapy or appointment. Not a page, not a figure, not a tier label, not a story in the forum.

This matters more in arts in health than in most subjects, because the thing that goes wrong is subtle and it is not scepticism. It is the opposite. Somebody has a genuinely good hour in a singing group, or watches a relative come back into the room for twenty minutes, and a thought forms: perhaps this is what he needed all along, perhaps the tablets are doing less than we thought, perhaps the memory clinic appointment can wait until after the summer.

A session that helps is not evidence that a medication is unnecessary, that a diagnosis was wrong, or that an appointment can be dropped. Those are different claims, resting on completely different evidence, and none of the research described on this site supports any of them. If a creative activity is helping, that is a reason to tell the clinical team about it, not a reason to see less of them.

Changes to any prescribed treatment are made with the person who prescribed it. If you want to reduce or stop something, that is a conversation to have, not a decision to take alone after reading a website.

Not a substitute for care

This site is general information. It is not a clinical assessment, and it is not a substitute for professional advice, diagnosis or treatment from a qualified professional. In particular, nothing here substitutes for:

• psychiatric or psychological care, including a crisis assessment
• physiotherapy or rehabilitation, including gait, balance and falls work after a stroke or with Parkinson’s
• speech and language therapy, which is a different profession from music therapy and is not replaced by it
• a memory assessment, which is how dementia is diagnosed and how treatable causes of confusion get found
• pain management, palliative and end of life care

An arts therapy runs alongside these things. On any properly organised team it is one intervention among several, which is precisely why nobody working in it would suggest it stands in for the rest.

What a tier label means, and what it does not

Efficacy claims on this site are labelled Tier 1, Tier 2 or Tier 3, and the full definitions are on the editorial policy page. Two cautions belong here as well.

A Tier 1 label is a statement about a body of research, not a prediction about you. An effect measured across a group of trial participants tells you very little about what will happen to one particular person, and nothing on this site should be read as a forecast of your own outcome or your relative’s.

A Tier 3 label is not a verdict that something is useless. It means the question has not been settled by adequate controlled research. Plenty of worthwhile things sit there.

Creative work can bring difficult things up

This is the part most readers have not considered, and it is a real safety point rather than a formality.

Making things, playing music, moving, and improvising in a group can surface memories, grief and distress that a person was not expecting and had not decided to open. That is not a malfunction; with a registered therapist it is often part of the work, held deliberately and safely. It is also one of the concrete reasons the registered professions exist, why their practitioners carry clinical supervision, and why they are trained to notice what has been opened and to help close it before the session ends.

A community activity leader, and this includes the person who founded this site, does not have that training and does not have clinical supervision. Good community practitioners know where their limits are and who to hand on to. It remains a real difference, and it is worth knowing which kind of session you or your relative is walking into. If a creative session has left someone distressed, that is worth raising with their GP or clinical team rather than waiting to see whether the next one goes better.

If someone is in crisis

If you or someone else is in immediate danger, or at risk of self harm or suicide, contact your local emergency number or urgent mental health service now. This site cannot help with that, and reading further will not change that. Nothing here is triage.

No professional relationship

Reading this site, or writing to it, creates no clinical or therapeutic relationship of any kind. The reviewers named here review pages. They are not your therapist or your relative’s therapist, cannot assess anybody they have not met, and will not comment on a named individual or a named practitioner.

Accuracy, sources and external links

Considerable effort goes into describing sources accurately and dating them, and no warranty is given that everything here is complete, current or applicable to your circumstances. Research in this field moves, and figures quoted here can be superseded. Links to other organisations are provided for reference. Those organisations are cited, not affiliated, and this site is not responsible for their content.

Any reliance you place on this site is at your own risk. Always seek the advice of a qualified professional about a health condition, and never disregard or delay professional advice because of something you have read here.