Music may be an inexpensive way to help people feel more comfortable after surgery
Dragos Condrea/Alami
Listening to music after surgery appears to relieve pain and anxiety in patients, and may be a cheap and easy way to reduce pain medication use.
“Many people wake up from anesthesia disoriented,” said Eldo Frezza at California North State University School of Medicine. “They feel anxious or may be feeling the pain of the surgery.”
Research has repeatedly shown Music can make people calmwhich prompted Frezza and colleagues to investigate whether it could help after surgery.
The team analyzed results from 35 studies that looked at how listening to music immediately after surgery affected people’s pain, anxiety, heart rate and use of painkillers.
Each study involved about 100 people, half of whom were asked to listen to different genres of music after abdominal or bone-related surgery. The studies varied in how long participants did this, from half an hour until discharge.
The remaining participants – who matched the previous group for age, sex and type of surgery – did not listen to music after the surgery.
Frezza’s team, which presented findings at the American College of Surgeons Congress in San Francisco, California, found that music appeared to reduce pain levels by about 20% on average in those who listened to the music, based on self-reports using a scale of 20 to 80. They also needed half as much morphine while in the hospital as those who didn’t listen to music.
The research team also found that listening to music seemed to reduce anxiety. It lowered heart rate by about 4.5 beats per minute on average and lowered self-reported anxiety levels by about 2.5 points (again, on a scale of 20 to 80 points).
“A reduction of 2.5 percentage points is quite small, but it’s moving in the direction we hope,” said Anne Heidscheidt Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK.
Music takes our attention away from pain in the following ways Increase levels of a signaling molecule called serotonin It travels between brain cells, making us feel good and also distracting us from anxious thoughts, she said. Heidscheit said this could be a cheap and easy way for hospitals to help patients recover after surgery.
Frezza said future research should include large studies in which people who had the same type of surgery around the same time were randomly assigned to listen to music or no music after the surgery. He said this would yield more reliable results than combining results from previous smaller studies.
Blissfulcalmways
