Quotes on Music Therapy

 

Dr. Clive Robbins (Nordoff-Robbins Music Therapy Clinic): "Almost all children respond to music. Music is an open-sesame, and if you can use it carefully and appropriately, you can reach into that child's potential for development." Nordoff-Robbins uses music therapy to help over 100 handicapped children learn and to relate and communicate with others.

Dr. Oliver Sacks ("Awakenings"): Dr. Sacks reports that patients with neurological disorders who cannot talk or move are often able to sing, and sometimes even dance, to music. Its advocates say music therapy also can help ease the trauma of grieving, lessen depression and provide an outlet for people who are otherwise withdrawn.

Barbara Crowe (past president of the National Association for Music Therapy): "Music therapy can make the difference between withdrawal and awareness, between isolation and interaction, between chronic pain and comfort -- between demoralization and dignity."  

Oliver Sacks, M.D.: "I regard music therapy as a tool of great power in many neurological disorders -- Parkinson's and Alzheimer's -- because of its unique capacity to organize or reorganize cerebral function when it has been damaged."

Mathew Lee (Acting Director, Rusk Institute, New York): "Music therapy has been an invaluable tool with many of our rehabilitation patients. There is no question that the relationship of music and medicine will blossom because of the advent of previously unavailable techniques that can now show the effects of music."  

Mickey Hart (Grateful Dead): "(Rhythm) is there in the cycles of the seasons, in the migrations of the birds and animals, in the fruiting and withering of plants, and in the birth, maturation and death of ourselves," Hart told a Senate panel studying music therapy. <REUTERS, Aug. 1, 1991