Abstract
Introduction: The use of theater performance and storytelling programs encourage expression for young cancer patients can be a form of therapy. Children diagnosed with cancer in hospitals are superheroes at the best of times, facing greater daily challenges requiring hospital admissions and outpatient appointments. The anxiety, loneliness, distress, and fear that is often felt during ‘normal’ times has only been heightened during the cancer treatment journey.
The field of therapeutic performance acts offer unlimited opportunities for both practitioners and parent to learn better ways to support children’s own inner processes of imagination and motivation, to strengthen and to provide comfort. Learning objectives are long stays in hospital wards, bored with no fun life activities, sensitivity and increased anxiety due to medical procedures, especially the invasive diagnostic checks and a real life activity that brings joy, releases anxiety and kills boring times.
Methodology: Healing performance acts is a comprehensive guide that explores the power of theater, costumes, acts, storytelling and metaphors in therapeutic settings for young people. Simple play performance such as bring in emotion and have it aligned with the content of the theater act and the story played as well, use your five senses. Include the emotion, hot or cold, tense, sad, or relaxed? Record the performance act play and then listen to the audiotape of yourself telling the story again, and ask how involved you are in the emotions of the tale and how congruent your emotions seem to the content of the story.
Results: The therapist may talk about what a person needs todo to protect himself from a bear with a sore paw as a means for managing the circumstantial or emotional issues the listening child is encountering with a pain.
In answer to an increasingly impersonal medical environment, educators in the medical humanities However, to elicit, to interpret, and to integrate patient stories into their work effectively, physicians must be in a state of awareness and attention, attuned to their emotional and intellectual reactions. The voices of patients and their families hold both literal and allegorical lessons for physicians in how to move toward a medical practice involving not only diagnosis and treatment but also recognition and healing.
Conclusion: The children also took part in a word association exercise at the end of the interventions with words like ‘hospital’, ‘nurse’ and ‘doctor’. As it is a low-cost and highly safe intervention, it can potentially be implemented in the entire public system, once larger-scale studies verify its reproducibility and effectiveness.