Physical therapy (PT), also known as physiotherapy, is a healthcare profession, as well as the care provided by physical therapists who promote, maintain, or restore health through patient education, physical intervention, disease prevention, and health promotion. Physical therapist is the term used for such professionals in the United States, and physiotherapist is the term used in many other countries.
Dementia is a syndrome associated with many neurodegenerative diseases, characterized by a general decline in cognitive abilities that affects a person's ability to perform everyday activities. This typically involves problems with memory, thinking, behavior, and motor control. Aside from memory impairment and a disruption in thought patterns, the most common symptoms of dementia include emotional problems, difficulties with language, and decreased motivation. The symptoms may be described as occurring in a continuum over several stages. Dementia ultimately has a significant effect on the individual, their caregivers, and their social relationships in general. A diagnosis of dementia requires the observation of a change from a person's usual mental functioning and a greater cognitive decline than might be caused by the normal aging process.
A sleep disorder, or somnipathy, is a medical disorder of an individual's sleep patterns. Some sleep disorders are severe enough to interfere with normal physical, mental, social and emotional functioning. Sleep disorders are frequent and can have serious consequences on patients' health and quality of life. Polysomnography and actigraphy are tests commonly ordered for diagnosing sleep disorders.
Apraxia is a motor disorder caused by damage to the brain, which causes difficulty with motor planning to perform tasks or movements. The nature of the damage determines the disorder's severity, and the absence of sensory loss or paralysis helps to explain the level of difficulty. Children may be born with apraxia; its cause is unknown, and symptoms are usually noticed in the early stages of development. Apraxia occurring later in life, known as acquired apraxia, is typically caused by traumatic brain injury, stroke, dementia, Alzheimer's disease, brain tumor, or other neurodegenerative disorders. The multiple types of apraxia are categorized by the specific ability and/or body part affected.
Music therapy, an allied health profession, "is the clinical and evidence-based use of music interventions to accomplish individualized goals within a therapeutic relationship by a credentialed professional who has completed an approved music therapy program." It is also a vocation, involving a deep commitment to music and the desire to use it as a medium to help others. Although music therapy has only been established as a profession relatively recently, the connection between music and therapy is not new.
Art therapy is a distinct discipline that incorporates creative methods of expression through visual art media. Art therapy, as a creative arts therapy profession, originated in the fields of art and psychotherapy and may vary in definition. Art therapy encourages creative expression through painting, drawing, or modelling. It may work by providing a person with a safe space to express their feelings and allow them to feel more in control over their life.
Cognitive disorders (CDs), also known as neurocognitive disorders (NCDs), are a category of mental health disorders that primarily affect cognitive abilities including learning, memory, perception, and problem-solving. Neurocognitive disorders include delirium, mild neurocognitive disorders, and major neurocognitive disorder. They are defined by deficits in cognitive ability that are acquired, typically represent decline, and may have an underlying brain pathology. The DSM-5 defines six key domains of cognitive function: executive function, learning and memory, perceptual-motor function, language, complex attention, and social cognition.
In neurology, semantic dementia (SD), also known as semantic variant primary progressive aphasia (svPPA), is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder characterized by loss of semantic memory in both the verbal and non-verbal domains. However, the most common presenting symptoms are in the verbal domain. Semantic dementia is a disorder of semantic memory that causes patients to lose the ability to match words or images to their meanings. However, it is fairly rare for patients with semantic dementia to develop category specific impairments, though there have been documented cases of it occurring. Typically, a more generalized semantic impairment results from dimmed semantic representations in the brain.
In neuropathy, primary progressive aphasia (PPA) is a type of neurological syndrome in which language capabilities slowly and progressively become impaired. As with other types of aphasia, the symptoms that accompany PPA depend on what parts of the brain's left hemisphere are significantly damaged. However, unlike most other aphasias, PPA results from continuous deterioration in brain tissue, which leads to early symptoms being far less detrimental than later symptoms.
Speech–language pathology (a.k.a. speech and language pathology or logopedics) is a healthcare and academic discipline concerning the evaluation, treatment, and prevention of communication disorders, including expressive and mixed receptive-expressive language disorders, voice disorders, speech sound disorders, speech disfluency, pragmatic language impairments, and social communication difficulties, as well as swallowing disorders across the lifespan. It is an allied health profession regulated by professional bodies including the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) and Speech Pathology Australia. The field of speech-language pathology is practiced by a clinician known as a speech-language pathologist (SLP) or a speech and language therapist (SLT). SLPs also play an important role in the screening, diagnosis, and treatment of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), often in collaboration with pediatricians and psychologists.
The Institute for Music and Neurologic Function (IMNF) is a US nonprofit organization conducting research into and applying music therapy. It is located in Mount Vernon, New York.
According to some music therapists, the use of Music in the therapeutic environment has an affinity with psychoanalysis in that it addresses obstructions in the mind that might be causing stress, psychic tension, and even physical illness. Music has been used, in conjunction with a psychoanalytic approach, to address symptoms of a variety of mental disorders, as well as forms of emotional distress, such as grief, loss, mourning, and trauma.
Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a neurodegenerative disease that usually starts slowly and progressively worsens, and is the cause of 60–70% of cases of dementia. The most common early symptom is difficulty in remembering recent events. As the disease advances, symptoms can include problems with language, disorientation, mood swings, loss of motivation, self-neglect, and behavioral issues. As a person's condition declines, they often withdraw from family and society. Gradually, bodily functions are lost, ultimately leading to death. Although the speed of progression can vary, the average life expectancy following diagnosis is three to twelve years.
Richard E. Cytowic is an American neurologist and author who rekindled interest in synesthesia in the 1980s and returned it to mainstream science. He was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for his New York Times Magazine cover story about James Brady, the Presidential Press Secretary shot in the brain during the assassination attempt on President Reagan. Cytowic’s writing ranges from textbooks and music reviews, to his Metro Weekly "Love Doctor" essays and brief medical biographies of Anton Chekhov, Maurice Ravel and Virginia Woolf. His work is the subject of two BBC Horizon documentaries, “Orange Sherbert Kisses” (1994) and “Derek Tastes of Earwax” (2014).
The temporal dynamics of music and language describes how the brain coordinates its different regions to process musical and vocal sounds. Both music and language feature rhythmic and melodic structure. Both employ a finite set of basic elements that are combined in ordered ways to create complete musical or lingual ideas.
For patients with Alzheimer's disease, music therapy provides a beneficial interaction between a patient and an individualized musical regimen and has been shown to increase cognition and slow the deterioration of memory loss. Music therapy is a clinical and evidence-based intervention that involves music in some capacity and includes both a participant and a music therapist who have completed an accredited music therapy program.
Musical hallucinations describes a neurological disorder in which the patient will hallucinate songs, tunes, instruments and melodies. These hallucinations are not correlated with psychotic illness. A majority of patients who have symptoms of musical hallucinations are older and have onset conditions predisposing them to the disease. While there is no set form of treatment, research has discovered medications and alternative therapies to be successful in alleviating the hallucinations.
Music therapy for non-fluent aphasia is a method for treating patients who have lost the ability to speak after a stroke or accident. Non-fluent aphasia, also called expressive aphasia, is a neurological disorder that deprives patients of the ability to express language. It is usually caused by stroke or lesions in Broca's area, which is a language-dominant area that is responsible for speech production located in the left hemisphere of the brain. However, when lesions form in Broca's area this only affects patients’ speech ability, while their ability to sing remains unaffected. Since several studies have shown that right hemispheric regions are more active during singing, music therapy involving melodic elements is deemed to be a potential treatment for non-fluent aphasia, as singing might activate patients’ right hemisphere to compensate with their lesioned left hemisphere. Aside from singing, many other music therapy techniques have also been attempted such as rhythms and poetic emphasis, which is shown to add to the effectiveness. Although there are many possible explanations for the mechanism of music therapy, the underlying mechanism remains unclear, as some studies indicate contradictory results.
Music as a coping strategy involves the use of music in order to reduce stress, as well as many of the psychological and physical manifestations associated with it. The use of music to cope with stress is an example of an emotion-focused, adaptive coping strategy. Rather than focusing on the stressor itself, music therapy is typically geared towards reducing or eliminating the emotions that arise in response to stress. In essence, advocates of this therapy claim that the use of music helps to lower stress levels in patients, as well as lower more biologically measurable quantities such as the levels of epinephrine and cortisol. Additionally, music therapy programs have been repeatedly demonstrated to reduce depression and anxiety symptoms in the long term.
Medical ethnomusicology is a subfield of ethnomusicology, which according to UCLA professor Timothy Rice is "the study of how and why humans are musical." Medical ethnomusicology, similar to medical anthropology, uses music-making, musical sound, and noise to study human health, wellness, healing and disease prevention including, but not limited to, music as violence.
