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For centuries across many different cultures music has traditionally been considered a healing art. But can it still have a role in our modern world?
With all the current concerns and difficulties in our health services can we really justify attending to our sense of beauty when there is clearly so much physical need?
I believe the answer may well be a resounding Yes!
Recent research from the Chelsea and Westminster Hospital in London has shown that patients who could listen to live music whilst they waited for appointments or treatment were more than 30% less anxious and depressed. Further significant benefits were also found in levels of pain, whilst undergoing chemotherapy, for women during labour and in many other areas of medical treatment.
Using Music to communicate with people who can no longer use words
Music can prove a particularly effective way of connecting with people when they can no longer use language after they suffer stroke or dementia for example.
Music is experienced extremely early on in life. Recent studies have proven that from well before birth the unborn child is fully musically aware and sensitive. ‘Music’ in the form of the wordless ‘motherise’ that all mothers naturally use with their newborn babies is so deeply involved in our earliest experience of emotional communication that researchers have discovered that much of the ‘music’ we enjoy later in life is based upon it. It is because of this that so many people who have cared for a loved one suffering from Alzheimer’s have discovered how alive and ‘present’ they become as soon as some long distant song or dance tune from their youth is played.
It may not be realized that the knowledge of this deeply ‘hardwired’ connection between Music, Memory and Emotion is what drives film makers and advertisers to continually reinforce their messages in music.
Music as Medicine
Even though music is a powerful sedative and analgesic-relieving stress and pain, most responsible health professionals would not suggest that it as a ‘cure’, although it can certainly be a most effective treatment. However this is a distinction that is also currently being reassessed by medical science. Listening to the music we love significantly reduces cortisol ( a marker of stress and distress) which in turn ‘up-regulates’ our immune system. The rhythms of music are also particularly effective at releasing the natural opioids which give us pleasure and reduce pain. So the ‘good’ use of music not only gives us a sense of enjoyment and relaxation but also improves our general health and wellbeing.
Rhythms for Health
Because we have a powerful urge to move with musical rhythms, tapping to the beat and moving our bodies to the music, we can also use music to ‘entrain’ and change our levels of arousal through the autonomic nervous system – lowering blood pressure and de-stressing our breathing etc. If this is true, you may well ask, why is it that Music is not a standard remedy that we could receive by prescription? A good question!
Well, first of all it’s only recently that medical science has turned its attention once more to this area. Partly that’s because the medical world is quite correctly committed to the scientific method (proving rather than just believing). Music delivers a complex mixture to assess, combining as it does, sound and rhythm, pitch and tradition, culture and aesthetics. Until quite recently its been very difficult to separate out the effect of music from our personal subjective experience and this still remains tricky, However new approaches to health particularly in the understanding of psycho-social medicine and the relationships between people and their environments together with significant advances in the brain sciences are giving us a new set of tools and insights. It is also true that before music can be fully implemented into our medical world as a valuable therapy further research and assessment will be needed.
The Peninsula Medical School in Exeter, Plymouth and Truro in the South West of England is leading the way in this and have just appointed me as Visiting Professor in Music and Medicine in order to help spearhead this work.
Music and Community
Of course most active music-making (singing in a choir, dancing to music, playing instruments together) involves other people. We now know that associating in social gatherings is particularly good for our health (people who belong to clubs and churches and so on, it seems tend to live longer and visit their doctors less frequently) once again we find that music has a particular effectiveness in this area.
So for example when we listen to music our levels of Dopamine, Serotonin, Noradrenaline and Oxytocin are beneficially altered. These brain chemicals are particularly involved with reducing aggression, increasing trust and openness, pleasure and the reduction of stress and pain.
Music it seems helps us share with others. It actually provides us with the subtle feelings, emotions and impetus to do so with pleasure and furthermore without side effects – if this was a conventional biomedicine how much would we be willing to pay for it I wonder?
A language without words?
There is another aspect of music that makes it especially valuable in health and medicine. Music, it is often said is a ‘universal language’ in fact the great composer Mendelssohn once remarked; ‘Music is too precise to express in Words!’ This does indeed seem to be the case, contemporary brain mapping has shown that how we interpret the sounds of music is remarkably similar to the process of deciphering words and language.
However at an even deeper level because our musical systems are so fundamental (and universal), we use music as a kind of internal map and as a system of self knowledge. Try and recall your earliest musical memory and you will feel how powerfully this evokes your earliest sense of identity and relationships! All the way through life (albeit often unconsciously) we identify ourselves, who we are, who we belong with and what we hold dear with specific pieces of music or musical memories. Most of us also have strongly held beliefs about what is ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in music. This piece we like and that one we don’t – why and how is this?
In answering these questions we find ourselves taking stock of ourselves in unexpected and often revealing ways. Our musical preferences are strangely expressive of who we believe ourselves to be. Such knowledge is also of great value to doctors. Not only in order to better understand and empathise with their patients, but also, vitally to understand and better appreciate themselves.
In this way music is a great healer and in our modern world the old adage ‘physician heal thyself’ applies to us all. I would recommend music as an important component for this broader healing environment.
Professor Paul Robertson is ex founder and leader of the Medici String Quartet, a Cultural Leader of the World Economic Forum and Chief Executive of Music Mind Spirit He is an eminent international lecturer, performer and broadcaster and for many years has played a leading role in shaping peoples thinking about the power of creativity through the arts and sciences.
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