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This Week at TEDMED

When the chart can’t tell the whole story

This week, explore how art and creativity can reveal what medicine may miss, from the lived experience of illness to new ways of connecting through dementia.

What can art tell us that medicine can’t measure?

Tests, scans, and charts can reveal what is happening in the body. But they cannot always show what illness feels like from the inside. Artist and patient advocate Ted Meyer joins TEDMED’s Lindsey Lynch to explore how patient-created art can make pain, fear, identity, and survival visible. It gives patients a way to be seen beyond the chart.

What if connection doesn’t depend on memory?

When dementia changes language and memory, our instinct may be to keep searching for what has been lost. Anne Basting offers another way in: creativity, imagination, and open-ended questions that allow people to make meaning together in the present. Connection can begin with what is still possible.

When creativity becomes part of care

Art, music, and storytelling can do more than comfort. They can reveal experiences medicine struggles to measure, create new ways to connect, and return agency to people whose lives have been reshaped by illness. Explore what becomes possible when creative expression becomes part of how we understand and care for one another.

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