PATIENTS RECOVERING from heart surgery who were given music to listen to through headphones while they were still asleep and on ventilators, spent about three and a half hours less in an American intensive care unit (ICU) than patients receiving normal post-operative care, according to recent research.
“The music-listening patients also reduced their sedative medication by 10 per cent,” said Dr Fred Schwartz, anaesthesiologist at the Piedmont Hospital, Atlanta, Georgia, who presented the study, Music and the Heart, at the first meeting of the International Association for Music and Medicine at University of Limerick at the weekend.
“We were in the process of installing music into the ICU so half the patients had headphones and half didn’t,” explained Dr Schwartz. “We started them on light piano music and when they woke up they could ask for something else. We let them listen to as much music as they wanted to and then analysed the differences between the two groups.”
A Finnish study of 54 stroke patients found that listening to music of their choice for one hour a day over three months significantly improved recovery.
“We found the music-listening group were less confused, less depressed and showed more focused attention and better verbal memory than patients who listened to audio books or nothing at all,” explained Dr Jaakko Erkkila from the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland.
According to Dr Erkkila, there are a lot of case studies outlining the benefits of music for medical patients but more randomised controlled trials of music in medical settings are needed before it becomes more established.
About 130 health professionals attended the international meeting which was jointly organised by the Irish World Academy of Music and the Graduate Medical School at University of Limerick.
