With the Singathon’s success in raising over £1000 for Music in Hospitals & Care (MiHC) last month, I decided to write this month’s blog on music and health. Music and health is such a massive subject; there’s no way I can cover it all in this short blog, so instead of spreading myself thinly over lots of different topics within the discipline, I’m going to focus more specifically on music and pain. When considering music’s effect on pain, various thoughts come to mind about how it can help: it can distract, it can relax and perhaps less well known but just as important, it can have physiological effects.
Before I go into more detail, I should start by saying that there are still flaws and complications with some of the studies that have provided data which I’ll use in this blog. For example, a lot of studies on music and pain rely on results extracted from self-reports of symptoms, which tend to be subjective and rely on honesty of participants. Self-report studies also focus more on perceived severity of symptoms and don’t prove felt severity of symptoms. Studies that do measure physiological impacts so far haven’t been very conclusive e.g. 54 studies found heart rate was affected by music but 26 found no change. However, music and health is still a growing discipline so hopefully with more experiments and more results, music’s impact on health will be made more evident.
I don’t know about you, but I think one of music’s best qualities is that it has the ability to distract you from how you’re feeling or sometimes even what you’re doing (which admittedly isn’t great if you’re listening to it while trying to complete important work!). For example, even on a long car journey where it’s easy to get bored as a passenger, I find listening to music can help distract you from your physical space and take you somewhere else following the story and emotion of the music you’re listening to. In a similar way, listening to music can also distract from pain, with the more you get involved with the song, the more you forget your pain. This can also be true for playing or writing music too, or at least it is for me. I find particularly if I’m writing an ambitious piece or practising a difficult passage, I get lost in concentration and determination to do the best that I can.
Sometimes though, pain can be too severe to focus on anything that requires too much brain activity, and in this case, we can turn to music to help us relax and meditate. Everyone has their own type of music that helps them relax or reduces anxiety, but for me I often find slow tempo classical piano music with beautiful melodies and harmonies can help me, such as the 2nd movement of Shostakovich’s Piano Concerto No. 2, Liszt’s Liebestraum or slightly more modern and jazzy, Hiromi’s Green Tea Farm. I haven’t taken part in any experiments that prove these pieces do reduce my stress and help me relax but I always feel like they do and there are other experiments to show that music can have those effects.
For example, a study by Redding, Plaugher & Cowan (2016) revealed that Music Therapy demonstrated effectiveness in decreasing anxiety and pain, supporting relaxation, reducing sedation medication during procedures and improving patient satisfaction. Mitchell, MacDonald & Knussen (2008) found that pain intensity rating was decreased by music listening when compared with silence, and frequent listening to the study’s chosen piece in everyday life was found to negatively correlate with anxiety level. Additionally, an extent of knowledge of the lyrics further positively correlated with tolerance of the pain stimulus and perceived control, which suggests that relationship and familiarity with favourite music is key to its therapeutic effect. So between these studies, it seems apparent that music can have a positive effect on pain relief, particularly if it is music that the patient is familiar with.
Another study by Thomspon Jr. (2010) also supported this, stating that music can help patients by reducing the amount of perceived pain, promoting relaxation, rhythmic breathing and rest, alleviating anxiety and stress and giving their mood a positive boost. It can also have significant improvements in their respiration, blood pressure, heart rate and muscle relaxation, enjoy more peace of mind and a better quality of life. But perhaps the most useful finding from this study was that patients undergoing Music Therapy for chronic pain management have been found to require less pain medication which could be essential when considering the effectiveness of music as a treatment.
It is difficult to know how reliable these studies are without further research being done but it is really encouraging that Music Therapy can reduce the amount of medication needed for some patients. It is also ethically difficult to perform further tests which result in reducing or stopping medication for patients in order to test how effective Music Therapy as a painkiller is, but it is still possible if patients are safely monitored and feel they can comfortably reduce chemical medication with the assist of music medication. Therefore, these studies do suggest that music can be used safely as a painkiller.
As I said earlier, these studies still have their flaws so can’t be trusted as completely reliable, but they still provide us with really useful information. Even though the physiological impacts of music are inconclusive over various studies at the moment (though hopefully further studies will be able to prove music’s physical effects on health), the psychological benefits of reducing perceived pain are much more prevalent. Therefore, as long as Music Therapy can be useful for relieving perceived severity of symptoms, even if we’re not as sure about the symptoms themselves, music can be used as a painkiller in place of or in addition to something like paracetamol. Please don’t try music in place of chemical medication if you have more serious conditions and without the guidance of medical professionals and music therapists, but for everyday aches and pains, why not try listening to or participating in some music and see its positive benefits on health for yourself.
If you’d like to see/hear me talk more about music and health, you can tune in to my show Music as Medicine for The Mental Health Warriors, where I, along with Robbyn and other guests, discuss music’s effects on mood, mental health and more.
Comentários