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From: Erika Shira
Date: 14 Oct 2008
Time: 22:08:01 -0500
Remote Name: 66.92.76.147
Aw man, I was hoping for some good stories of rogue music therapists you've encountered! ;o) Seriously though, yes, this clears it up. And it's true that we work a lot more with folks who have multiple and/or more severe disabilities. I think the confusion/devaluation tens to come into play because a lot of the work expressive therapists do IS aimed at improving quality of life, rather than making any measurable progress. People see this type of work and think "oh, I could play drums with retarded children too." As you as a professional of course know, any sort of exposure to activities is going to enhance quality of life, but a clinician is going to do even more by really being able to read people and use techniques to interact with people who are hard to interact with. With kids with autism, MT is a related service under IDEA, while other things that are valuable but not really educational/clinical services (being exposed to pets, going to theatre productions, etc.) are not. In order to have music therapy included in an IEP, the student generally has to have scores on the SEMTAP showing that s/he performs certain cognitive tasks better with the support of a music therapist. (In severe sped, this might not be the case, and every student might automatically get MT if there's a MT on staff). So even though the work might be around quality of life, there still would be evidence in place that MT is aiding in some type of skills building. On the psych end though, remember that most of psychology isn't a hard science, and there are TONS of services that are reimbursable in educational and medical settings that we don't really have a lot of hard data to back up. We don't even have much hard data that sitting and talking with a counselor benefits anyone, but most people would agree that this helps many people. As far as I know, we haven't done a lot of studies on things such as how having a 1:1 can prevent out-of-control behavior for some people. I'm getting off topic here, but just wanted to remind people that a lot of reimbursable and legitimate therapies are mainly validated only by qualitative data. Oh, btw, I've worked with several people with autism on fluency. So there's even some overlap there!