Healing power of creativity

By Robert Gitchell (’64 BA, ’67 MD, ’72 R)

eMotion Pictures: An Exhibition of Orthopaedics in Art The Chicago Cultural Center Through July 20, 2008. Admission is free.

eMotion Pictures:
An Exhibition of Orthopaedics in Art

The Chicago Cultural Center
Through July 20, 2008.
Admission is free.

During my second year of medical school, our class did blood draws to determine our cholesterol levels. Some of my 24-year-old classmates registered cholesterols around 330. In 1965 we didn’t understand the significance of a number like this in young people, or the idea of measuring good cholesterol and bad cholesterol to predict a person’s risk of coronary heart disease.

Just as perplexing has been the impact of artistic expression on our physical well-being. There are stories of cancer patients who paint or draw during their chemotherapy, the sculptor who returns to the clay while recovering from total hip replacement or the boy with a broken wrist who can’t play soccer but instead paints pictures about his beloved sport. Their art somehow aids their healing. The American Academy of Orthopaedic Surgeons collected stories like these from more than 150 patient and physician artists–along with their art–for an exhibition this year marking the 75th anniversary of AAOS. "eMotion Pictures: An Exhibition of Orthopaedics in Art" is the second such show organized by AAOS. The first one led me back to the classroom, this time as an instructor.

I team-teach an honors seminar at Iowa State University called Art, Medicine, Healing and the Creative Process. The course evolved after I arranged to bring the inaugural "eMotion Pictures" exhibition to the ISU campus in 2003. Normally any particular honors course is offered for a couple of years, but I’ve been teaching this course with Joan Cunnick, an associate professor of animal science with an interest in psychoneuroimmunology, for five years. In that time, more and more quantitative evidence has surfaced speaking to a mind-body connection.

For years a wealth of anecdotal evidence has supported the power of positive thinking as a healing tool. It explains the placebo effect. But only recently has the science caught up with the stories. When people engage in creative activities–writing, painting, sculpting, dancing, singing–they change the production of interleukins, the cytokines that play an important role in the function of the immune system, enhancing beneficial cytokines and reducing those related to stress. Manmade cytokine injections boost the immune system. Interleukin–2 has been effective in treating certain cancers.

Measuring a person’s interleukin levels in relation to diseases–be it heart disease or cancer–should be a standard component of a diagnosis. We know that the levels of C–reactive protein and IL–6 are the two most valuable predictors of the risk for cardiac disease. Determining the cardiac CRP level is standard with a blood test. IL–6 is not. All of this will likely change in the next five to 10 years, which is why my students need to understand alternative medicine, placebo and that perception begets reality in the sense that if you think something, you are having a huge effect on your body. It isn’t just because we’ve witnessed that effect; now you can actually measure why.

Some argue this should give validity to spend money on an art program in a hospital, or in our schools, as opposed to schools that have shed cultural opportunities to gain resources for stronger math and science curriculums. Creative endeavors are valuable, not simply to develop the whole person, but because of the positive aspects to one’s physical life as well. When people say laughter is good medicine, it’s because what you think and feel is producing good chemicals and good cytokines in your body.

Dr. Gitchell, of Ames, is a retired orthopaedic surgeon. The illustration is "What’s Missing," acrylic on canvas, by Octavia J. Mackey, featured in "eMotion Pictures."