NurseWeek

Let the
music heal you

By Pamela Wiley
Health24News
October 4, 2000


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Washington (H24N). The upcoming celebration in November of the American Music Therapy Association’s 50^th anniversary is a sign of a renewed interest in music as a therapeutic tool. In an age where more and more people turn to holistic methods of healing, music therapy offers a provocative option to supplement drug therapy.

The history of music therapy begins after WWI, when community musicians played the hospital circuit. Within several months it was documented that the veterans who had attended the concerts showed a remarkable change in their physiological and emotional well being. Researchers continued treating combat veterans with music therapy during the Second World War, and in 1944, the University of Michigan established its first music therapy degree program.

In the half century since the end of World War II it has been well documented that the introduction of music into a therapeutic program could provide a number of positive responses. Specialists have adopted the curriculum in an effort to aid stroke victims, Alzheimer’s patients, autistics, substance abusers, pregnant women, and those afflicted with depression.

Research has shown that developing an ear for music can lead to an enhancement of one’s communicative, academic, motor, emotional, and social skills. In physiological terms, music has been shown to lower blood pressure, alter brain wave patterns, ease anxiety, serve as an audio-analgesic, stimulate the release of endorphins, and increase the level of S-IgA, an immune system booster.

Practitioners follow the improvisational music therapy stylings of Nordoff-Robbins, Orff- Schulwerk and Guided Imagery and Music (GIM). These programs involve selecting appropriate music and arranging its presentation to maximize its therapeutic effects, prompting active listening, inducing bodily response, facilitating and coordinating lyrical discussion, and staging performance activities.

According to some music therapists, simple activities such as singing, playing, and listening to music accesses one’s psyche, which leads to self actualization and healing, while its more specific effects range from perfecting spatial language to regulating body rhythms and fine tuning motor coordination and expression. One practitioner suggests that even the use of a metronome helped stroke victims pace themselves as they learned to walk again.

Barbara Crowe, a past president of the National Association for Music Therapy, remarked that, "[Music therapy] can make the difference between withdrawal and awareness, between isolation and interaction, between chronic pain and comfort-between demoralization and dignity."

More than three-quarters of a century of research documents a connection between music and healing. Patients undergoing such therapy can look forward to enhanced sense of spiritual, cognitive, and emotional well-being. And more recently, practitioners are finding that music therapy has shown to be a promising physiological tool: that without medication, a beat of a drum can move patients several steps forward in the healing process.