The world’s woes got you down? Feeling burnout at work? Need a little something extra to fight illness or prep for surgery? The Swiss town of Neuchatel is offering its residents a novel medical option: Expose yourself to art and get a doctor’s note to do it for free.
Under a new two-year pilot project, local and regional authorities are covering the costs of “museum prescriptions” issued by doctors who believe their patients could benefit from visits to any of the town’s four museums as part of their treatment.
The project is based on a 2019 World Health Organization report that found the arts can boost mental health, reduce the impact of trauma and lower the risk of cognitive decline, frailty and “premature mortality,” among other upsides.
Photo: AP
Art can help relax the mind — as a sort of preventative medicine — and visits to museums require getting up and out of the house with physical activity like walking and standing for long periods.
Neuchatel council member Julie Courcier Delafontaine said the COVID crisis also played a role in the program’s genesis. “With the closure of cultural sites (during coronavirus lockdowns), people realized just how much we need them to feel better.”
She said so far some 500 prescriptions have been distributed to doctors around town and the program costs “very little.” Ten thousand Swiss francs (about US$11,300) have been budgeted for it.
If successful, local officials could expand the program to other artistic activities like theater or dance, Courcier Delafontaine said. The Swiss national health care system doesn’t cover “culture as a means of therapy,” but she hopes it might one day, if the results are positive enough.
Marianne de Reynier Nevsky, the cultural mediation manager in the town of 46,000 who helped devise the program, said it built on a similar idea rolled out at the Fine Arts Museum in Montreal, Canada, in 2019.
She said many types of patients could benefit.
“It could be a person with depression, a person who has trouble walking, a person with a chronic illness,” she said near a display of a feather headdress from Papua New Guinea at the Ethnographic Museum of Neuchatel, a converted former villa that overlooks Late Neuchatel.
Part of the idea is to get recalcitrant patients out of the house and walking more.
Dr. Marc-Olivier Sauvain, head of surgery at the Neuchatel Hospital Network, said he had already prescribed museum visits to two patients to help them get in better shape before a planned operation.
He said a wider rollout is planned once a control group is set up. For his practice, the focus will be on patients who admit that they’ve lost the habit of going out. He wants them to get moving.
“It’s wishful thinking to think that telling them to go walk or go for a stroll to improve their fitness level before surgery” will work, Sauvain said on a video call Saturday, wearing blue scrubs. “I think that these patients will fully benefit from museum prescriptions. We’ll give them a chance to get physical and intellectual exercise.”
“And as a doctor, it’s really nice to prescribe museum visits rather than medicines or tests that patients don’t enjoy,” he added. “To tell them ’It’s a medical order that instructs you to go visit one of our nice city museums.’”
Some museum-goers see the upsides too.
“I think it’s a great idea,” said Carla Fragniere Filliger, a poet and retired teacher, during a visit to the ethnography museum. “There should be prescriptions for all the museums in the world!”
Ajay Verma, a consultant gastroenterologist at Kettering general hospital in Northamptonshire, says our gut is a “complex machine.” “It is constantly providing us with the nutrition we need, initially to grow and develop, and then for us to survive, thrive and repair from injury and illness.” How can we keep it functioning well? Put simply: “Make sure what you put into it is balanced, and that you clear out its waste products adequately,” Verma says. “In a general gastroenterology clinic, the most common conditions we see are irritable bowel syndrome (IBS), gastroesophageal reflux disease, inflammatory bowel disease and constipation,” says Nisha
The arithmetic is straightforward and uncomfortable. By the end of 2025, Taiwan had committed itself to a 50-30-20 electricity mix — half natural gas, 30 per cent coal, 20 per cent renewables. The Ministry of Economic Affairs’s (MOEA) own monthly energy reports tell a different story. Natural gas reached 47.8 per cent of generation last year. Coal stood at 35.4 per cent, comfortably above its target ceiling. Renewables came in at 13.1 per cent, well short of the 20 per cent Taipei had pledged a decade earlier. Installed renewable capacity reached roughly half of the 12 gigawatts (GW) the government
Taiwan’s drone exports are taking off, fuelled by the war in Ukraine, as Taiwanese companies seek a stake in the fast-growing global market for unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV). Low-cost drones used for reconnaissance and strikes are in high demand as governments around the world boost defense spending in the face of intensifying conflicts. A relative new player in the increasingly competitive industry, Taiwan’s pitch is to be an “Asian hub” for the production of UAVs and components free of Chinese materials, or “non-red.” That means its UAVs can be up to three times more expensive than their Chinese competitors, like the world’s biggest
There are shadowy cabals plotting to sell out Taiwan to be annexed by China, by invasion if necessary. Fortunately, they are buffoons. In 2019, former Bamboo Union gangster and founder of the China Unification Promotion Party (CUPP), Chang An-le (張安樂, colorfully known as “White Wolf”), led a protest at the Legislative Yuan against comments made by then-premier Su Tseng-chang (蘇貞昌) that in the event of an attack by China, he would never surrender, but would protect the nation by fighting to the end, even if he only had a broom. Chang had party members bring a wooden casket that they
RSS