GMAT - AWA ESSAYS: Art And Music Therapy

therapeutic effects of art and music?

Essay Question:

The following appeared in a medical magazine:

Discuss how well reasoned you find this argument. Point out flaws in the argument's logic and analyze the argument's underlying assumptions

My Response

The paragraph wrongly concludes that doctors are doing disservice to patients by applying drug treatments and invasive procedures. It also concludes that this result in the overall rising cost of health care in the United States. Several reasons below are presenting the argument provides unsupportive evidence.

First, it's oversimplification to conclude that the art and music therapy can apply to all illness and diseases. Doctors rarely recommend the therapy because the therapy can only has significant effect in several area. For mental illness, alternative therapy like art and music are helpful to manage stress, promote wellness, enhance memory, improve communication, and give people a way to express feelings. For physical illness, the therapy do help but most of the therapy effect focus on alleviating pain rather than healing physical body damage. For example, it is difficult to stop one's bleeding by asking someone just playing instrument and listening to music.

Second, the argument ignores the spending of applying art and music therapy might be. Listening to a music and enjoy a painting might be costless, but what if the therapy requires a patient to play instrument to stimulate the damage of nerves and mental disorders? Take a guitar for instance, a good guitar might cost hundreds and thousands of dollars. It is questionable that whether a patient can afford. Furthermore, the rare application of art and music therapy escalates the medical fee of the therapy. Seldom doctors and professional medical institution do a great job at applying this kind of therapy. We should evaluate the medical spending of the therapy before drawing conclusion that using drug treatments and invasive procedures is contributing to the rising cost of health care in the United States.

Yes, art and music therapy do help several physical illness by producing chemical to make a patient feel good so that alleviate his/her pain. And yes, there is some therapy that costs less, such as write songs, enjoy paintings and music. However, the therapeutic effect might be less, not direct, and takes a long time. How many patients or the family of patients wants to participate the therapy that takes long time and dedication. How many patients can stabilize during the therapy that takes time to heal one's harm.

Art and music therapy do have therapeutic effects to patients. But it has great limitations when comparing to normal drug usage and invasive procedures. Overall, the argument draw the conclusion that a doctor are doing a disservice to their patients and contributing to the rising cost of health care in the United States is lack of supportive evaluation.

Chang, in the first paragraph, you should completely mention the assumptions being made in the discussion presentation. You accidentally omitted the mention that music therapy is the alternative healing process being suggested in the discussion. By omitting that topic in your discussion paraphrase, the reader will begin to wonder how music therapy fits into the discussion you are presenting. Always be clear aspects the comparative aspects that you wish to include in your discussion in order to strengthen any claims you will be making,

Don't start a new sentence with the word "and". instead, connect that to the previous presentation by using a comma to indicate a different but connected discussion point. You should also be conscious of your discussion presentations. You are presenting an analysis of the given discussion. That means all the information for consideration has been provided to you. Therefore, your presentation becomes unnecessarily complicated when you present questions in the essay. Rather posing a question, present it as a fact that the writer did not consider while writing the article instead.

Aside from a few grammar errors and the observations above, you did a good job of presenting an analytical discussion. Further practice essays written in this manner could ensure that you get more than a passing score in the actual test.