At what point do partnerships between business and doctors become a bad thing? Some doctors are actually prescribing trips to the museum to help with chronic pain. Read on.

This is happening in Canada. And while their healthcare system is a bit different from our own, yes, trips to the museum don’t exactly sound like great pain relief. But they’re doing it in a new partnership between the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and Canada’s physicians’ association. Doctors are actually, literally prescribing tickets to the museum to help with various ailments. Doctors say that a day spent browsing the museum can actually be good for a lot of things. Some things they mentioned include mental health, high blood pressure, all the way to diabetes and eating disorders. Also, there’s talk it may help with Alzheimer’s, and may also relieve pains associated with cancer.

One doctor says about these “prescriptions” that “It’s so rare in medicine that you prescribe something and you do not need to worry about all those side-effects or interactions with other medication.” The partnership is qualified as “experimental treatment,” and participating doctors can issue up to 50 of these “prescriptions.” The art director of the museum, Nathalie Bondil, says that she’s already noticed that art can help one’s well-being. She pitched the idea to the medical association, and it really got doctors thinking. “We know that art stimulates neural activity… What we see is that the fact that you are in contact with culture, with art, can really help your well-being,” she says.