Dan Rather called the Center for Music Therapy, Inc., “on the cutting edge” of music therapy during a CBS 48 Hours prime time feature in 2001. The Journal of the American Medical Association, New York Times bestseller “The Mozart Effect,” BBC and many others have agreed with Rather’s assessment of the programs offered through the Center for Music Therapy over its impressive 20-year history.

The center is an Austin-original therapy company that has consistently set new standards for tuning into the needs of clients. National and international recognition has come from a continued ability of its president and founder, Hope Young, MT-BC, to provide a solid business model for therapy services.

Young’s approach is based on the latest scientific research and trends in music therapy, neurology, psychology and music medicine. Years of government relations and reimbursement experience have provided her with the insight necessary to consider the political, financial and legal forces that tend to influence most therapy and medical services models we see in the United States. Young has worked to understand these pressures so she could create a clinical practice focused on meeting the needs of clients, while breaking free from the limiting effect such pressures can have for both consumers and providers of health care.

One of the center’s newest services is designed to achieve just that. Health for a Song is an innovative treatment support program for individuals, caregivers and their families who are living with a diagnosis, condition or recurring problem and having difficulty maintaining therapeutic routines and self-care on their own.

Offered as a monthly membership program, Health for a Song is similar to a gym or health club where members can attend regularly scheduled group programming as often as they like six days a week.

“Health for a Song is meant to get ahead of the curve of the impending health care crisis,” Young notes. “It provides a support program for consumers to have access to licensed and certified health care professionals who can help them sustain good practice and rehearsal of the things they need to do to maintain the gains made while in individual therapy. It is also a way to practice what their health care provider has told them they need to do in order to avoid therapy.”

Young says she developed this idea after watching the hospital and care facilities she has worked with over the last 20 years continually having to cut much-needed services due to changes in insurance and Medicare practices. Patients today are discharged from treatment and given things to do on their own that used to be part of treatment. Unfortunately, many patients and their caregivers are not able to successfully follow through with these recommendations on their own. As a result, patients stagnate in their progress or get worse – often more so than before they were first seen for treatment.

“I knew we could do better than this for both ourselves as health care professionals and for our patients,” Young says. “I’ve been developing the Health for a Song program for over 10 years to get us out of the box and into new possibilities for people who want to live better even when [they] have a diagnosis or recurring problem in [their] life.”

Overcoming obstacles is a skill Young credits to learning from her patients. “You’re inspired to continually try again,” she says. “When my patients survive horrific accidents or traumas and dare to look me in the eye with hope and a will to get better, that is one of the most powerful and moving experiences I have known.

I have always desired to match their hope and will with the best help I can provide. Health for a Song and our newest facility are both designed to empower people through using effective sensory-based interventions to meet my patients’ potential for continued growth in their lives.”

The center’s newest facility at 2700 W. Anderson Lane was built to help and support people who need to integrate and increase sensory input in order to improve their functioning and well-being.

Many specialized features were incorporated into the facility to address these objectives. For example, as you enter the front doors, you’ll find contrasted floor patterns that give clear direction for which way to walk.

You can also see a built-in trapeze with equipment to safely spin, rock and move in your physical/occupational therapy session as you listen to a prescribed music program designed by certified music therapists.

Individual treatment rooms enable therapists to personalize sessions to facilitate trauma recovery or support other social and emotional needs. Each therapy room has its own sound system, dimmer-controlled lighting and one-of-a-kind sound healing platform that allows you to feel sound and music gently through your body, helping reduce pain and increase relaxation.

Feeling the sound of the voice through the body helps increase the brain’s awareness. The brain processes this more efficiently so patients can produce improved and more accurate speech.

Young was one of the original owners and users of these special platforms developed in the early 1990s for use in hospitals and clinics.

She continued experimenting with this technology at her clinic for the last 15 years. She has long-planned the expanded use of this tactile sound method to help people with pain, tension, stress and hearing impairments, and has introduced this treatment to clients with neurologic disorders and those who need increased input through their senses to produce better treatment outcomes.

To learn more about the Center for Music Therapy, call 512-472-5016, or visit www.centerformusictherapy.com.