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Music Therapy: A Medical Application of Music
Listening to music has become an integral part in society. Whether someone is walking along the street, driving around, or even sitting in a room, chances are that they are listening to music. Music has inexplicable capabilities. It is a gateway, having the ability to transport the listener to different worlds. It has the ability to make a room full of exhausted wedding goers get up and dance. It has the ability to make someone smile on a mundane car ride home from a horrible day at work. It has the ability to make someones body tingle after listening to an awe-inspiring symphony. It even has the ability to make someones face whither in disgust if the dissonance is just right.
Music makes someone feel these emotions due to the chemicals the brain releases when we listen to it. It releases dopamine, which is the feel good chemical. Dopamine increases pleasure receptors, and it is triggered as a reward for meeting a desire of our body. It can be triggered by activities such as sleeping or eating. The brain also releases endorphins. This gives a person a sense of euphoria through a happy state of mind. Endorphins are also a natural pain reliever, which can show that listening to music has physical feel-good capabilities. Immunoglobulin A is released when listening to music. This antibiotic cell searches for and attacks viruses and other threatening agents in the body. An increased number of antibodies strengthens the immune system. Cortisol, a stress hormone, is also drastically lowered in presence while listening to relaxing music. The absence of a high amount of cortisol helps ease anxiety and stress. Music can also change the physical response of the body, relaxing muscles and lowering blood pressure and heart rate when listening to relaxing rhythms, and increasing heart rate when listening to music with a faster tempo.
Music therapists work to manipulate these attributes in order to heal a person who is struggling emotionally, mentally, psychologically, or even physically. Music therapy is the use of music to achieve non-musical goals. They work with all domains of human functioning: cognitive, communication, psychosocial, musical, physical, emotional, spiritual, and many more. They work in all settings from NICU (newborn intensive care unit) to hospice, including schools, hospitals, psychiatric facilities, substance use and abuse facilities, and physical rehabilitation centers by using various aspects of music to elicit change. This form of therapy has been around for a while, with the earliest application being associated with early Native Americans where they used music to communicate with their gods and nature as well as a healing tool and a form of socialization within their community. It was fairly common for a community to come together in order to chant, dance, and pray for ill members of the community. The concept of music therapy itself has been around since the writing of Aristotle and Plato.
Music therapy has been on the rise in popularity, and has been since the treatment was recognized as an accredited form of treatment after World War II. When nurses and doctors at the time saw how patients responded to music as a method to cope with physical and emotional trauma caused from their time serving the country, people were able to witness the power of music as a healing tool. At this time, there was a push to establish an educational program for people to professionally practice music in a medical setting, thus birthing music therapy in the West.
Music therapy plays a role in helping patients recover after suffering from traumatic brain injuries. Traumatic brain injuries are seen as a silent epidemic, forcing the person who is suffering from the injury into a coma. Comatose clients can be classified in eight different levels, according to the Rancho Los Amigos scale of cognitive functioning levels. At level II, the patient reacts inconsistently and non-purposefully to stimuli in a nonorganized manner. Responses to these stimuli may be as subtle as an eye twitch, slight head movement, or internal muscle movements. Responses are limited, but they are often the same. When a rhythmic phrase or tone is played for a level II patient, these responses may be recorded to ensure that the patient is still alive and aware of the outside world. At levels III-VI, the patient is still responsive and movement is increased. They usually display confused behavior and are often unable to make coherent conclusions about their memory or their environment. Music therapy can augment the patients awareness about their environment.
The music therapist may play and sing songs for the patient in order to help them gain a better understanding of their surroundings. These songs are often improvised, as they are simple vocalizations about everyday objects and various other topics an aware person may see as common sense. Patients who fall in this range may also benefit from group music therapy sessions from a group of close friends and family. For example, when live music is played for a patient and the support group, clients count or sing along and often match the energy emitted by the group. Range of motion is often dramatically increased as well since the patient is moving their body in rhythm to the music. Cognitive and speech production efforts are largely improved when paired with tonal and rhythmic stimuli, as seen in speech therapy. Speech therapy in conjunction with music therapy often yields better results since the patient is singing along with lyrics and provides some rhythmic foundation. As a result, music therapy patients who fall in this range demonstrate improved language reception since they are using and stimulating their left hemisphere more effectively than if they were simply trying to talk and construct a sentence.
Lets apply this concept to someone who has received a traumatic brain injury and seen a significant recovery through music therapy. In early 2011, Arizona Congresswoman Gabby Giffords was shot in the head, with the bullet passing directly through her brain. 6 Her injury made her suffer from aphasia, the inability to speak due to damage to language pathways in the brains left hemisphere. Professionals had to work to restore her speech by essentially helping the brain pave new pathways around damaged areas to get to its destination. Language is held largely in the left side of the brain, while music activates visual, motor, and coordination areas on both sides of the brain as well as regions farther into the brain involved with memory and emotion. By having music therapist Meaghan Morrow sing little ditties like Happy Birthday and Giffords favorite song Brown Eyed Girl , she was able to slowly pave the road back to language. Her brain was able to use existing neural pathways to work around the damaged area in order to overcome the language barrier. 3 This is similar to how a person age 50 or 60 would learn how to play the piano. Its much easier to do so at a younger age, since the neural connections have yet to be established. At an older age, the brain must retrain itself to perform tasks and engrave it in muscle memory. Thanks to music therapy, Giffords was able to relearn how to talk.
Music therapy also plays a role towards the end of a persons life while theyre in hospice care. Music therapy sessions can help a person maintain a relatively high amount of energy and can help them reflect and reminisce upon their life through music, thus facilitating pain control and bringing closure to their soul. Music therapy within hospices can vary in form. In one case study, two patients had weekly music therapy sessions where they partook in guided imagery with music. The process of guided imagery with music involves relaxation exercises, verbal suggestion of scenes or settings, and imaginative thought as music is being played in the background. Structured musical procedures such as this involve active listening, concentration, and relaxation exercises that can be helpful to hospice patients. For those who have lost a lot of their physical abilities, guided imagery allows the patient to gain a sense of control in their life, allowing the patient to explore and be creative with their thoughts, images, and feelings.
One patient in this case study suffered from bladder cancer with a significant amount of pain in her right leg. She was depressed, resided in a nursing home where she was alone a large portion of the time, and she had no immediate family to take care of her. In a majority of her music therapy sessions, she was asked to imagine her favorite place. She often described her home and went into detail about how wonderful the room furnishings are, elaborating about how she would change the space to make it more beautiful. She would then be haunted by an image of her cancer. She would describe it as a large, red, twisted, ball-shaped mass. However, as the weekly sessions went on, she later imagined Pac-Man attacking her cancer
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