What Are the Right Tools for Studying Arts in Health Interventions?

The arts can touch places that are difficult to recognize and understand, capture in words, or measure by numbers-whether you're an artist, a patient, or an educator. This ineffability presents a dilemma for practitioners and researchers in arts in health when questions of legitimacy, efficacy, program implementation, and research funding are tied to outcomes-based research. Ethical tensions arise when traditional public health and clinical research methods are the wrong tools for capturing what's vital about the arts.

Mindfulness-based interventions for medication adherence: A systematic review and narrative synthesis.

Objective: Inadequate medication adherence is a significant limitation for achieving optimal health outcomes across chronic health conditions. Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) have been increasingly applied to promote medical regimen adherence as MBIs have been shown to improve patient-level barriers to adherence (i.e.

Artists on the Research Team: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Team Science, Research Rigor, and Creative Dialogue.

In an arts in public health research team, artists may be undervalued as key research collaborators because of the difficulties in skillful integration of experts who possess not only different bodies of knowledge but also different ways of examining and valuing the world. Under the stewardship of two Rhode Island state agencies, an innovative research-driven enterprise, comprising researchers, clinicians, and community artists, was brought together to integrate arts-based interventions into statewide public health policy and practice. Here, we examine our work with the Rhode Island Arts and Health Advisory Group as a case study to illuminate our experiences in collaborating with artists on public health policy and practice research.

The Use of Music in the Treatment and Management of Serious Mental Illness: A Global Scoping Review of the Literature.

Mental and substance use disorders have been identified as the leading cause of global disability, and the global burden of mental illness is concentrated among those experiencing disability due to serious mental illness (SMI). Music has been studied as a support for SMIs for decades, with promising results; however, a lack of synthesized evidence has precluded increased uptake of and access to music-based approaches. The purpose of this scoping review was to identify the types and quantity of research at intersections of music and SMIs, document evidentiary gaps and opportunities, and generate recommendations for improving research and practice.

Heterogeneity of outcomes for intraoperative music interventions: a scoping review and evidence map.

Background: Over the past 30 years, numerous studies have been performed that assess the efficacy of intraoperative music as an adjunctive means to regional and local anaesthesia to improve clinical outcomes. Despite an emerging body of evidence and growing adoption of music in surgical settings, the variety of interventions studied, and the heterogeneity of outcomes and outcome measurement tools applied makes difficult the task of aggregating evidence.

Objective: This study assesses the state of the field of intraoperative musical interventions by documenting and visualising the breadth of outcomes measured in studies.

What Cy Twombly's Art Can Teach Us About Patients' Stories.

Some patients' stories can be hard to tell and hard to listen to, especially in pressured, time-pinched clinical environments. This difficulty, however, doesn't absolve clinicians from a duty to try to understand patients' stories, interpret their meanings, and respond with care. Such efforts require clinical creativity, full engagement, and the recognition that emotions and personal feelings leak into the space between storyteller and story listener.

Community-engaged Evidence Synthesis to Inform Public Health Policy and Clinical Practice: A Case Study.

Background: This case study documents the work of the Rhode Island Arts and Health Advisory Group, which convened in 2016 to develop a set of policy, clinical practice, and research recommendations for implementation by the Rhode Island Department of Health, The Rhode Island State Council on the Arts, and partners. Comprised of artists, clinicians, community members, and patients, the group partnered with researchers to complete an evidence synthesis project of arts-based health care interventions.

Methods: The group took a community-engaged approach to evidence synthesis, featuring the use of online, and in-person training materials to facilitate the codesign and coexecution of the evidence synthesis protocol.

Opioids and pain in the emergency department: a narrative crisis.

The opioid crisis poses challenges to patients who come to the emergency department (ED) in pain and the clinicians who have a duty to offer relief. In search of help, patients often find suspicion. But clinicians have reasons to be concerned about feeding addiction and its lethal consequences.

Does information from ClinicalTrials.gov increase transparency and reduce bias? Results from a five-report case series.

Background: We investigated whether information in ClinicalTrials.gov would impact the conclusions of five ongoing systematic reviews.

Method: We considered five reviews that included 495 studies total.

Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality Evidence-based Practice Center methods provide guidance on prioritization and selection of harms in systematic reviews.

Objectives: Systematic reviews should provide balanced assessments of benefits and harms, while focusing on the most important outcomes. Selection of harms to be reviewed can be a challenge due to the potential for large numbers of diverse harms.

Study Design And Setting: A workgroup of methodologists from Evidence-based Practice Centers (EPCs) developed consensus-based guidance on selection and prioritization of harms in systematic reviews.

AHRQ series on complex intervention systematic reviews-paper 2: defining complexity, formulating scope, and questions.

Background: The early stages of a systematic review set the scope and expectations. This can be particularly challenging for complex interventions given their multidimensional and dynamic nature.

Rationale: This paper builds on concepts introduced in paper 1 of this series.

Mutagenic evidence for the optimal control of evolutionary dynamics.

Elucidating the fitness measures optimized during the evolution of complex biological systems is a major challenge in evolutionary theory. We present experimental evidence and an analytical framework demonstrating how biochemical networks exploit optimal control strategies in their evolutionary dynamics. Optimal control theory explains a striking pattern of extremization in the redox potentials of electron transport proteins, assuming only that their fitness measure is a control objective functional with bounded controls.