Chronic nonmalignant pain is recognized as a complex, dynamic, phenomenological interplay between biological, psychological, and social factors.

There has been a growing interest in exploring arts therapy for chronic nonmalignant pain management and this area of study remains rather unexplored.

The authors try to analyze the relevant literature in order to suggest the implication of arts therapy in multimodal chronic pain management.

Visual art therapy, music, dance/movement therapy, and written emotional disclosure therapy have been analyzed.

The work brings interesting ideas on what and how to incorporate arts therapy into the treatment of chronic nonmalignant pain, but when searching and analyzing the included studies and their results, they encountered deep methodological problems and other limitations including a small sample of available clinical trials.

Based on the review, it is not possible to clearly demonstrate the effect of arts therapy in the treatment of chronic nonmalignant pain and more research is needed.