Art and nutrition - and how to combine them for healthier patients
Viola Pruss | CBC News | Posted: February 10, 2017 12:00 AM | Last Updated: February 10, 2017
Catherine Morley will give a talk at UPEI about using art to better understand a patient's illness
The acting director of nutrition and dietetics at Acadia University feels there is no higher art form than food.
Catherine Morley drives this point home in the classroom, teaching her students never to lecture patients about proper nutrition when they're sick but to explain it to them through art.
That includes bringing people together to prepare a meal.
"Food is the greatest art form ever," she said. "So when they engage people in, let's say, cooking together (…) people open up and talk."
Understanding patients
In March, Morley will bring a talk to the University of Prince Edward Island to show students a different take on preparing for their health and human services careers.
She believes that art can help health professionals understand what their patients go through and create new opportunities to approach their illnesses.
But before they can bring the art to the patient, they must first explore it themselves, she said.
Morley has created a program where students are required to make art that explores an illness. It teaches them to think like their patients, she said.
Past projects included building the digestive system from buttons, or a student who cast her leg to learn about the impact of diabetes on the body.
"They think it's weird and I must be insane," she said in an interview with Mainstreet P.E.I. on Thursday. "And then they have to embark on this creative process,
"And they say this is really the hardest assignment I ever had but it's the one where I learn the most."
Better than giving lectures
Morley said she first came up with this approach in university while researching the way people eat when they become seriously ill.
Her supervisor told her that nobody wrote about the subject before, so she made it her doctoral project.
"When I graduated, I found some of my colleagues said that's not even really a topic, that's not something to study," she said.
"And I thought, well, what else is there to study if you're a dietician working with people who are ill?"
Disappointed, she switched to taking night courses in textiles.
That's when she discovered how she could use art in her career and how to teach others about ways to engage with their patients, she said.
"That's very different from having people in a room and giving them a lecture," she said. "We know that doesn't work."
Morley's original talk was scheduled for Friday as part of UPEI's 2017 Arts and Science lecture but had to be postponed because of the pending snowstorm.
A date for the March lecture has not yet been set.
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