More Hospitals Healing With the Help of Music Therapy

Nov. 6, 2000 -- It was the day of her surgery, and Kate Richards was face to face with her phobia -- the surgery itself. Her diagnosis: a large ovarian cyst, which caused episodes of tremendous pain. She needed surgery soon, her doctor advised her.

"I was terrified," Richards tells WebMD. "My mother had multiple surgeries when I was very young -- years ago -- and she had a lot of pain with them. I knew my fear was related to what she had gone through. I knew that things are different in hospitals now ... but still there was this whole imprint of that experience." Richards just couldn't get past her anxieties.

Richards -- a trained vocalist and songwriter -- turned to music to soothe her fears. Wearing headphones and listening to her own singing on tape, she was ushered into surgery. When she woke up in recovery, a real-life guitarist was strumming her favorite lullabies. "The woman in the bed next to me was smiling," Richards remembers. "It wasn't the usual recovery room experience ... loud, abrasive, harsh ... I somehow felt my nerves were being massaged."

Her experience is not unique. In a sprinkling of hospitals, music is increasingly being used as therapy.

"Selection of music is very personalized," says Joanne V. Loewy, PhD, director of the music therapy program at New York's Beth Israel Medical Center. "For some, classical music might work best, for others it might be jazz. It depends very much on the person."

"Music therapy is about being in the moment and adapting music to fit the patient's needs," Loewy tells WebMD. "There are no distinct recipes."

As in Richards' case, music can ease anxiety and even reduce the perception of pain. It can even decrease the need for medications that help patients deal with fear and pain, says Loewy, who consults internationally with hospitals starting music therapy programs.

"We see it in patients admitted for any kind of surgery," she tells WebMD. "For some, it's fear of surgery ... for others, even having blood drawn can produce a lot of anxiety." At Beth Israel, if that fear of pain is preventing you from facing the procedure, musicians can be at your side -- perhaps playing an improvisational piece -- helping take your focus away from your fears, away from the pain.

"I still felt the pain but could tolerate it. ... I guess the music helped me relax, so it softened the pain. I needed less pain medicine because of it," she says.

Loewy says, "There's a belief that music and pain are processed along the same [nerve] pathways. So if we have a patient playing or focusing with the music, they won't feel the pain."

Even asthmatics are benefiting from music therapy -- learning to breathe and gaining better breath control by blowing a horn or other wind instrument, Loewy says. "They're working lung muscles, but they're also creating something." That's somehow fitting, since Beth Israel's music therapy program is funded by the estate of legendary jazz musician Louis Armstrong, she says. "He would love it that we use winds to build lung volume capacity through breath control."