Abstract

This book teaches, provides painful insight, and creates awareness and empathy for the patients, families, and caregivers who are living and working every day within a framework of tragedy. This book is also great entertainment. You will laugh and cry, sometimes simultaneously, throughout your reading.'

- From the Foreword by Kay Roskam, Board Certified Music Therapist

Filling a Need While Making Some Noise is an inspiring and engaging nuts-and-bolts guide for music therapists who are interested in working in pediatrics.

Kathy Lorenzato paints a vivid picture of what it's like to work, as a member of support staff in a teaching hospital, with children and families who are facing tremendous health challenges, and for whom music therapy is part of their treatment or recovery plan. She explains the beneficial effects of music therapy on children with physical or mental illness and offers many helpful suggestions and background information on practicing music therapy in a hospital environment, the kinds of instruments to use and how to work successfully with medical staff and how music therapists can help their patients' families to cope with the hospital experience. Lorenzato also describes the therapy programs she designed to complement the treatment of and recovery from specific medical conditions she has encountered, from cancer to trauma caused by child abuse.

This book will be an invaluable resource for music therapists, both newly qualified and experienced, members of the medical and childcare professions and students in these fields.

This book teaches, provides painful insight, and creates awareness and empathy for the patients, families, and caregivers who are living and working every day within a framework of tragedy. This book is also great entertainment. You will laugh and cry, sometimes simultaneously, throughout your reading.
From the Foreword by Kay Roskam, Board Certified Music Therapist
Kathy Irvine Lorenzato earned a degree in piano performance before she learned about music therapy and realized she needed more than life in a practice room could offer. She graduated from California State University, Long Beach in 1981 with a certificate of music therapy. Upon moving to Davis, she found no work available in music therapy so she took a job typing in the basement of UC Davis Medical Center. Eventually she convinced Pediatrics to give her a home, and has been happily working there for the past 17 years. Kathy is married with two remarkable and funny teenagers, and a big, orange dog.