Music therapy and its educational-transfromatic power in the treatment of oncological diseases in adolescence

Abstract

Oncological disease in developmental age represents a profoundly critical event, evoking suffering, anguish, and fear. Despite therapies' progress and recovery chances increase, unfortunately, aggressive and painful treatments involve significant changes in the image of their body, lifestyle, and social relationships for the adolescent.

To avoid that all this affects evolutionary development, a holistic global therapeutic approach has been consolidated since the 1970s. This approach has shifted the concept of healing from that of the physical care of the sick to a more humanistic transformative one in which the care of the sick person also involves their complexity, emotions, relationships, desires, etc. By developing a multidimensional approach to the person felt, listened to, and lived in its totality, music therapy represents effective educational support capable of generating well-being and beauty even in the adolescent oncological path.