Melodies Counter Maladies

Recently the Daily Southtown published an interesting article on the benefits of music therapy for the treatment of cancer and rehabilitation. Music therapy is an important tool in communicating with individuals at different levels; it helps to stimulate, grab attention and build motor skills.

Evidence mounts on the medical benefits of music therapy.

Published by the Daily Southtown July 17, 2007

There's a reason even the most flat, tone-deaf and shrill of us sing in the shower. It makes us feel good, says music therapist Donalyn Richardson.

Doctors, too, are embracing the feel-good properties of music for the treatment of cancer and rehabilitation.

Banner Desert Medical Center in Mesa, Arizona, for example, recently received national certification as a music-therapy internship site. The program reflects the fact that music therapy is gaining ground as a complementary treatment.

"It's definitely a feather in our cap," says Richardson, Banner Desert's music therapist. It signifies "more of a support from a traditional medical standpoint that people are more than their bodies."

Music therapists say they are being afforded the same credibility as speech and physical therapists, thanks to growing evidence of music's tangible health benefits.

Consider:
*According to a study last year released in the Journal of Advanced Nursing, people who listened to music for an hour every day for a week reduced their chronic pain by up to 20 percent and lowered their depression by as much as 25 percent. Participants in the study kept a pain journal during the week; the study didn't indicate how long patients benefited from the therapy after it was discontinued.
*The Cleveland Clinic in 2001 found that music lowered stress levels and helped build immunity in young cancer patients. It is unclear how long patients' immunity stayed elevated.
*A University of Miami researcher who continued his work at Michigan State University found in 1999 that levels of melatonin in Alzheimer's patients increased and that patients became more active, slept better and cooperated more with the nursing staff after undergoing four weeks of music therapy. The increased levels of melatonin - a hormone linked to sleep regulation, increased immunity and a calm relaxed mood - stayed elevated for up to two weeks after the music stopped.

Other research suggests that music boosts weight gain in premature infants, lowers the heart rate and improves the recovery time of stroke victims.

Music therapists offer more heartfelt evidence. Richardson speaks of writing lullabies with mothers on the verge of premature delivery so they can relax and know they are bonding with their child, and of being thanked by a family that was comforted when she sang "Amazing Grace," at the bedside of a dying person.

Music therapist Lisa Sampson, who works with Phoenix Children's Hospital, says anecdotal evidence, such as a patient who previously showed no arm movement but who now can shake a tambourine during music therapy, abounds.

"What's really neat about music is that even if I don't speak Taiwanese or Korean, I can bring in a huge ocean drum and the child and I can move it back and forth," Sampson says. "We don't need to speak the same language to understand one another."

Sampson began doing music therapy in the Phoenix area in 1999. She now oversees 16 people who work in hospitals and other medical settings.

In a tiny circle of chairs at Banner Desert Medical Center, parents accompanied children who, in wheelchairs or attached to intravenous drips, banged on the drums they held in their laps. Richardson told them to "think about what's bugging them big time," to put that thing in the center of the drum, and to pound as loudly as they want.

Dallas Vaughan, 6, put his boredom and frustration at being separated from his siblings in the drum's center with a series of pings. His father, Scott, beat his own drum loudly.

"I couldn't say enough good things about this program," Scott Vaughan says.

Maureen Cahill, senior clinical manager of pediatric oncology at Banner Desert Medical Center, also weighs in, saying she believed that music therapy was a frill 15 years ago.

"Then I became convinced," she says. "If we could study it here, I do believe these kids who use music as a symptom reliever use less pain meds, less often."