When Medicine meets Art
The body and the psyche are deeply connected and mutually conditioned. The improvement of the psychological state influences that of the somatic state. The role of psychology in prevention, therapy, rehabilitation after mental and physical stress, an illness, a discomfort is crucial and requires more attention in order to treat patients as global units in order to promote their psychophysical well-being.
Hippocrates, Pythagoras, Aristotle, Leonardo da Vinci, Galileo Galilei had already conceived medicine as a union between science and art. Science was understood as knowledge of all the circumstances relating to human health and art was interpreted as the ability to apply this knowledge to the treatment of diseases. According to Aristotle, medicine is art par excellence. Science is a system of knowledge obtained through rigorous research activity. Medical art is born from the encounter between different disciplines of empirical knowledge: science, technology, culture, social organization. Integrating science and art in an interdisciplinary way can prove to be a fertile frontier.
The therapeutic power of Art
Can art cure? It certainly can help. Art is a privileged intellectual and emotional experience, intimate, projective, interpretative, with a high transformative power. It promotes the well-being of the body and the psyche. It relaxes tension, regenerates mood, increases creativity. It opens the mind, reduces fear, helps overcome discouragement, releases, activates narration and change. It stimulates the integration of rationality and affectivity in a harmonious, dynamic, flexible way. It makes you imagine and dream, anticipates the future. It’s a mirror, it reflects the deepest parts of those who observe it. It lowers resistance and prejudices, suspends possibilities, stimulates evolution. It is liberating, cathartic, sublimates suffering. It has a high impact on moods. It amplifies the desire to live. The human world is predisposed to art, in any condition. Even in situations of crisis and emergency, art represents a vessel to face stormy waters, a light in the darkness, a North Star that shines with its own light. Art is a mysterious journey: it shows new horizons, pushes towards the frontiers of the unknown. It is relational: it connects, it creates bridges. Some images of art provoke, touch and move the most hidden parts of the personality. Art is a wonderful Adventure. It is a mirror, that reflects, like a Rorschach card, the innermost part of the observer. To talk about the artwork means to reveal oneself. Some visuals from Contemporary Art promote change: they touch and move the most hidden, rigid, obscure parts of our personality.
We deal with images continuously. We are capable of producing mental images. The unconscious reveals itself to us through images in dreams.
Authentic artworks are Universal, Immortal, Essential, Primary, Relational. Thanks to their ambivalence and ambiguities, their symbolism and their mysteries, Artworks perturb the Unconscious, overcoming the barriers of defence and resistance, and modify distances, overturn meanings, interrogate multiplicity, and stimulate the emergence of new resources. Artworks stimulate feelings, perceptions, and Psychosomatic Effects. They activate Imagination, Fantasy, and Creativity through Projections and Reflection. Artworks promote knowledge through new interpretation processes, thoughts, Learning, Attitudinal Orientations, Communications. They causes Actions, Decisions, and better Socialization.
Artworks can be a disruptive force because they are elusive, inexhaustible, infinitely challenging. They penetrate into the Unconscious with greater strength and speed than words: drive and transmit energy, revitalize, affect the personality in its operation and structure. They make Identity no longer be ‘identical’, placing it in suspension between many possibilities, pushing her towards the frontiers of creative change and towards new horizons of well-being.
Videoinsight®
The Videoinsight® Method was created in 2010 by Rebecca Russo, a graduate in psychology, specialized in psychotherapy, scientific researcher, contemporary art collector.
It is the innovative support for psychophysical well-being achieved through the viewing of specific images of contemporary art, selected on the basis of their content and their transformative potential. These images catalyze the psychological experience of insight, facilitating the emergence of sensations, emotions, learning, psycho-attitudinal orientations, actions and changes. Videoinsight® means having an essential intuition, an illumination, a discovery, an awareness, a deep and integrated re-visualization through interaction with selected works of contemporary art. The Videoinsight® experience involves the mind and affectivity at a conscious and unconscious level; it is able to cause the evolution of the Personality, the release from a stalemate and the promotion of psychophysical well-being; it can cause awareness, activate emotional resonances, evolutionary thoughts.
Insight (literally ‘internal vision’) means immediate and sudden intuition, intellectual and emotional awareness, internal and deep look, discovery of a psychological dynamic, understanding of a useful strategy that allows the solution of a problem, therapeutic transformation at conscious and unconscious levels.
The Videoinsight® Method integrates culture and health in a holistic and interdisciplinary way. It is centered on the person and represents a privileged path for cultural welfare: it improves life, increases social well-being, reduces the time and cost of treatments, fights chronicity, prolongs existential expectations, contains stress. It is concretely applicable for everyone because it offers an instinctive, simple and natural experience that is independent of age, sexual gender, socio-cultural belonging, religious belief, linguistic competence. It is centered on the Person and represents a privileged path for cultural welfare. It improves life, increases social well-being, reduces the time and cost of treatments, fights chronicity, prolongs existential expectations. It is applicable to everyone because it offers an instinctive, simple and natural experience that is independent of age, gender, socio-cultural background, religious belief, and linguistic competence. Art images must be chosen with competence, responsibility and ethics based on the psychophysical needs of patients.
The Videoinsight® Method has been tested in the clinical setting for diagnosis and psychotherapy, in Art for Care prevention programs aimed at a wide audience, and in medicine for post-surgical rehabilitation with significant scientific results.
In Psychology it has proven effective for the analysis of the request for help, diagnosis, reduction of anxiety and stress, stimulation of trust and motivation, prevention of discomfort related to the developmental crisis, orientation and enabling of functional aptitudes and talents to support the healthy resources of the personality, rehabilitation of psychological resources compromised due to physical illnesses, trauma, stress, crisis, developmental stalls, support of the personality in crisis, treatment of psychosomatic symptoms. It has been tested in childhood, adolescence, adulthood, and old age. The work of art with High Impact Videoinsight® is a sort of contemporary Rorschach Test. When the person interprets the image of art, he projects and reveals himself, his resources and vulnerabilities. It highlights deep desires, repressed resources, dreams never revealed, unconscious predispositions, whose disclosure and elaboration are fundamental and desirable for evolutionary change.
Rebecca Russo introduced a selection of contemporary Artworks (paintings, drawings, installations, videos, photos) in Psychodiagnosis and Psychotherapy methodologies in application of her concept of Videoinsight®. She has tested these selected Artworks for many years in the clinical setting reaching very important and significative results.
Contemporary Art can contribute to Diagnostic and Therapy. It can heal, promote change and solve individual and relational psychological distress. Some Contemporary Artworks are provocative, ambivalent, mysterious, and deep; they speak about the basic, and universal human needs; they offer an opportunity for personal development, progress, identification and Psychological Emancipation. Artworks stimulate an experience of freedom and “intellectual lightness”; they are emotional, affective, perceptual and mnemonic. They oblige us to think, to feel, to change; they transform us. Artworks create potentialities and open the door to future Change; they break the rigid schemes, and therefore they can heal, promote wellness.
In Orthopedic Medicine it has been used – from 2011 to 2017 – in two prospective randomized studies (Video Research – Acl, Video Research – Tka) and in an international multicenter pilot study (Pf Project). The method has been shown to accelerate functional recovery after reconstruction of the anterior cruciate ligament of the knee and after cemented prosthesis surgery. The benefits of applying the method have been measured with clinical and psychological scales. The results – published since 2013 in international journals with a high impact factor and brought to the attention of the international scientific community through participation in world medical conferences – have shown that selected images of art stimulate insights that impact on personality and the healing process.
Video – Acl Research
In 2012, the Videoinsight® Method was tested in the scientific research ‘Video- Acl’.
The aim of the study was to evaluate the effectiveness of the method as a support for re-education in the functional improvement of the patient after the anterior cruciate ligament (ACL) reconstruction surgery of the knee. The randomized, controlled, double-blind study, with a level of scientific evidence, lasted one year, was regularly approved by the Institutional Ethics Committee, was performed according to the most rigorous protocol, and took place at the Rizzoli Orthopaedic Institute of Bologna, II Orthopaedic and Traumatology Clinic, in collaboration with the team directed by Prof. M. Marcacci (Russo R., Zaffagnini S., Grassi A., Marcheggiani Muccioli G.M.). One hundred adult patients, divided into two groups of 50, subjected to the rehabilitation program, watched sixteen contemporary art videos evaluated on the basis of their transformative potential. The study hypothesis was that the use of the method would positively influence the post-operative clinical course and prognosis of patients undergoing ACL reconstruction at a minimum of 6 months of follow-up. The treatment group watched a random video among those that elicited movement stimuli; the control group watched a random video among those that did not elicit movement stimuli. The first Videoinsight® experience took place in the hospital two days after surgery. Subsequently, the patients watched the same video independently, at home, three times a week, for two months, transmitting their insights to the team. The orthopedic follow-up with the evaluation scales took place at 3, 6, 9 and 12 months. The results were significant in all the evaluation scales: subjective ikdc, objective ikdc, SF36 mental, SF36 physical, tegner activity level, tampa scale kinesiophobia. Patients in the treatment group benefited from the Videoinsight® experience by accelerating functional recovery, reducing kinesiophobia, and abandoning the crutch sooner.
Video – Tka Research
In 2013, the second experimental application of the Videoinsight® Method in medicine was carried out at the Rizzoli Orthopaedic Institute in Bologna, in a Research called ‘Video-Tka’. The one-year study followed a protocol regularly approved by the Ethics Committee according to the most rigorous scientific standards. It was carried out in collaboration with the Department of Physical Therapy and Rehabilitation directed by Prof. M.G. Benedetti and with the II Orthopaedic Clinic of the University of Bologna directed by Prof. M. Marcacci (Russo R., Zaffagnini S., Roberti di Sarsina T., Benedetti M.G., Mariani E.).
In this second research, one hundred and ten elderly patients following the implantation of a total knee prosthesis during the rehabilitation program were subjected to the Videoin-sight® Method. The subjects were shown four artistic videos, selected for their evolutionary impact after the Tka surgery. The videos were shown for ten days to patients in the treatment group before each physiotherapy session at the Institute. Patients subsequently watched the videos three times a week, for three months, at home, before each rehabilitation session. The hypothesis of the study was that the use of the method would positively influence the level of pain and be functional to the post-operative recovery of patients who had undergone total knee replacement surgery at three months of follow-up. The psychological evaluation scales were STAI (State Trait Anxiety Inventory), BDI (Beck Depression Inventory) and TSK (Tampa Scale of Kinesiophobia); the clinical ones were SF36, Womac, Vas, Kss. The results of the research were significant. Patients in the treatment group showed better values in the Womac, Vas, Kss, STAI, BDI, TSK scales.
The PF Study
In 2015, the ‘PF – Project’ Multicenter Pilot Study was conducted internationally for the use of the Videoinsight® Method as a therapy for the treatment of anterior knee pain in patients with patellofemoral problems, unsuitable for surgical treatment. It was performed simultaneously in the USA, at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis at the Orthopedic Surgery Center directed by Prof. E. Arendt; in France, at the Ljon Orthoclinic Chirurgie du Sport Hospital directed by Dr. D. Dejour; at the University of Kobe, in Japan, in collaboration with Prof. R. Kuroda; in Italy, at the Rizzoli Institute in Bologna, in collaboration with Prof. S. Zaffagnini; at the University of Molise, Department of Medicine, Health Sciences and Wellness Sciences, in collaboration with Prof. A. Schiavone Panni. The Videoinsight® Method was used as a therapy and not only as a support for a post-surgical rehabilitation protocol.
References
Russo, Videoinsight® Curare con l’Arte contemporanea; Healing with Contemporary Art, 2011, Silvana Editoriale
Russo R., Il Metodo Videoinsight®, postmedia, 2012
Pub Med, January 2013, Russo R., Zaffagnini S., Grassi A., Marcheggiani Muccioli G.M., sight®) Method: improving rehabilitation following anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction
Springer, Knee Surg Sports Traumatol Arthrosc. KSSTA, 2013 Apr. 21 (4) 851-8, Russo R., Zaffagnini S., Grassi A., Marcheggiani Muccioli G.M., ‘The Videoinsight(®) Method: improving rehabilitation following anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction – a preliminary study
Advanced Clinical Evidence Report, June 2014, ‘Russo R., Zaffagnini S., Grassi A., Marcheggiani Muccioli G.M., ‘The Videoinsight® Method improves subjective outcomes in ACL rehabilitation’
Orthoevidence June 2014, ‘Russo R., Zaffagnini S., Grassi A., Marcheggiani Muccioli G.M., ‘The Videoinsight® Method improves subjective outcomes in ACL rehabilitation’
Psychology Research, March 2014, Vol.4, N.3, Russo R., Zaffagnini S.The Videoinsight(®) Method: improving rehabilitation following anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction – a preliminary study, David Publishing Company, New York
Russo R., The Videoinsight® Concept, 2013, CIC Edizioni Internazionali, Roma
Adiutori S., Arti Terapie, N.23, 24 Gennaio 2015, ‘Immagini come cura tra Arte, Psicologia e Medicina. Il Metodo Videoinsight®
Medicina Psicosomatica, Aprile 2013, Russo R., ‘Il metodo Videoinsight® migliora la riabilitazione dopo ricostruzione del legamento crociato anteriore
Springer, Knee Surg Sports Traumatol Arthrosc.
KSSTA, May 2016, Russo R. Benedetti M.G. et al., ‘The Videoinsight® Method: improving early results following total knee arthroplasty
The Videoinsight® Collection, 2018, Mondadori
