of music therapy in other areas of medicine<\/a>, Goldfine said the team made the leap that the intervention could show success for emergency back-pain patients.<\/p>\n\u201cMusic has been used in other settings and studied in the pre- and peri-operative space, as well as with pain management,\u201d she said. \u201cWe were really thinking through how we could translate the work that had already been done in patients who were getting procedures or who had more painful scenarios. What we found is that it\u2019s also a very easily deployable solution.\u201d<\/p>\n
Scott Weiner, co-author of the study, added that besides the ease of implementation \u2014 simply providing headphones and a music player to patients \u2014 the intervention is extremely cost-effective. Weiner is an associate professor of emergency medicine at Harvard Medical School and an emergency physician at Brigham and Women\u2019s Hospital.<\/p>\n
\u201cI drew inspiration from another similar study that looked at adult coloring books given to patients. It seems like just something to get your mind off of it, whether it be reading or music or coloring, is probably helpful.\u201d<\/p>\n
Scott Weiner, co-author of the study<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s completely free besides the subscription for the music,\u201d Weiner said.<\/p>\n
The reason why the intervention is especially helpful, both Weiner and Goldfine said, is not because it targets root causes of the pain but because it may reduce exacerbating anxiety.<\/p>\n
\u201cThinking about this originally, I drew inspiration from another similar study that looked at adult coloring books given to patients,\u201d Weiner said. \u201cIt seems like just something to get your mind off of it, whether it be reading or music or coloring, is probably helpful.\u201d<\/p>\n
Emergency room patients often face overcrowded conditions and long waits, even when experiencing severe pain.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt\u2019s stressful because you\u2019re there watching everything unfold,\u201d Weiner said. \u201cThere are beeps; there\u2019s chaos; and plus, they\u2019re in pain. So the fact that maybe this aspect of distraction was enough to reduce their pain and anxiety with basically no harm at all to the patient is pretty remarkable.\u201d<\/p>\n
In the experiment, patients selected music to listen to for 10 minutes. Doctors then surveyed their pain at rest and with movement on a 10-point scale, before and after, and had them complete an anxiety questionnaire.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had a lot of discussions over what the best type of music intervention to choose would be,\u201d Goldfine said.<\/p>\n
But ultimately, she said, the music that patients find relaxing is subjective. Some people used a curated relaxation playlist. Many chose pop music.<\/p>\n
\u201cThere was some Taylor Swift in there,\u201d Goldfine said.<\/p>\n
She added that doctors and patients themselves can implement the lessons from the study right now.<\/p>\n
\u201cI try to use it when I\u2019m doing procedures on patients,\u201d she said. \u201cI have them put on whatever song they want, because I feel like it really does enhance the experience and with really no downside.\u201d<\/p>\n
Goldfine, Weiner, and their team are continuing to study the impact of music therapy in medicine. Currently, a study is in the works looking at connections between music and substance-use disorder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Playwright William Congreve wrote in the Restoration period that music \u201chath charms to soothe a savage breast.\u201d And,…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1740,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[84,103,397,396,61,60,410,278,89],"class_list":{"0":"post-1739","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-healthcare","8":"tag-brain","9":"tag-health","10":"tag-health-care","11":"tag-healthcare","12":"tag-ie","13":"tag-ireland","14":"tag-mental-health","15":"tag-music","16":"tag-research"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1739","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1739"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1739\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1740"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1739"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1739"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1739"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}