Oct. 21, 2024 – Having surgery? You may want to pack headphones for your hospital stay.
An early review of 35 studies found that listening to music after surgery may help lower your pain, anxiety, and heart rate. It may also help curb the amount of pain medicine (like morphine) you need, according to the research, which was presented at the American College of Surgeons Clinical Congress in San Francisco and has not yet been published in a peer-reviewed journal.
“When you wake up from anesthesia, sometimes people are really scared,” said Eldo Frezza, MD, a senior author of the study and a professor of surgery at California Northstate University College of Medicine in Elk Grove. “I’ve had patients who attack me, almost have a heart attack – so if we can reduce that, it’s really important.”
The study builds on early but growing research that suggests music can help promote health and help manage disease. Music calms you and may reduce levels of the stress hormone cortisol, the researchers said, providing relief from anxiety and pain.
So why isn’t music playing in every recovery room? Most hospitals aren’t designed to provide patients with personalized music after an operation. Frezza hopes that if his research gains traction, more evidence will follow to convince health care leaders to cooperate. If the finding holds up that music reduces morphine use, that could help save on costs, he said.
Some hospital systems do offer music therapy, a personalized intervention that can be used during medical treatment.
“There’s a distinction between music and music therapy,” said Joanne Loewy, DA, founding director of the Louis Armstrong Center for Music and Medicine at Mount Sinai Hospital in New York City. A music therapist “can decipher what music should be played, how long, is it live or recorded” – plus what tempos and volume levels would best aid a patient's healing.
Personalized music therapy is played at a patient’s bedside, usually with the curtain drawn, and designed based on individual patient assessments, Loewy said. Another strategy, called environmental music therapy, brings in live music to noisy hospital intensive care units to calm many patients at once.
But more detailed research on music and recovery rates is needed, Loewy said.
“There are very few studies that truly have patient-selected music,” she said. “If it’s jazz, is it Louis Armstrong or Kenny Rankin? If it’s classical, is it Mozart or is it Rachmaninoff? We’re talking about hundreds of years of differences – you can’t just offer genres.”
In the new study, the researchers were not able to tease out specific variables, like how long to listen to music or what type of music may be best for healing. For now, try listening to whatever music you enjoy, whether through headphones or a speaker, if you feel up to it after surgery, the researchers suggested.