Music therapy meets variety of patient needs
The benefits are tangible
Music therapy is gaining wide acceptance and has found solid administrative support at the University Hospitals of Cleveland, where Deforia Lane, PhD, MT-BC, offers it to patients through the Ireland Cancer Center, where she is an associate director and the director of the 12-year-old music therapy program.
Lane prefers live music to recorded, and treatments may involve a synthesizer, her voice, a violin, a keyboard, a dulcimer, maracas, bells, environmental sounds, and a variety of unusual rhythm instruments.
"I try to meet the needs of patients where they are. If they are focused on pain, then pain management is where we go. If they are extremely anxious, withdrawn, or depressed, then that's where I begin," she explains.
Music therapy can reduce pain reception and can lower, increase, or maintain blood pressure, heart rate, and respiration rate, Lane says.
"Those are some of the indicators of pain, so one of the ways I will reach them immediately is to bring out a synthesizer and begin playing something and ask them to strum it while I press the buttons. I will slow down or speed up the music, and usually what will happen is the patient's strumming will increase as the speed increases, which speeds up heart rate and respiration rate. It happens within the first five minutes. I engage the person, so the [patient] is not just listening but is sensing how music can help," she says.
If a patient is in a state of anxiety, Lane starts the pace of the music at that level and then slowly decreases the speed to bring the anxiety level down. While her work is mainly with cancer patients, she also offers music therapy in the ICU.
"When I work with intensive care patients, often they are intubated, on respirators, or being weaned from them; or they may be comatose, so they cannot talk or answer questions," she says. Lane often asks families what type of music the patient prefers and uses it, along with gentle massage, moving the limbs or swaying the patient slightly to the music. She can see on the monitors whether significant changes occur in blood pressure or heart rate.
Lane also has researched the effect of music therapy on patients' immune systems. In a controlled study, she found that salivary immunoglobulin A, which can be low or nonexistent in very ill people, significantly increased in a random sample of patients who were given 30 minutes of individual music therapy.1
Patients have even awakened from comas when treated with music therapy, she says, sometimes in the middle of a session. Lane treated a comatose patient who loved dulcimer music, playing it for him every day.
"After he woke up, he said he remembered hearing the dulcimer music, and he said it was the dulcimer music that woke him. He said he wanted to find where it was coming from, and it drew him to try to wake up to find it," she says. "The dulcimer was the only thing he remembered, and he lived to come out and tell me about it."
Reference
1. Lane D. The effect of a single music therapy session on hospitalized children as measured by salivary immunoglobulin A, speech pause time, and a patient opinion Likert scale. Unpublished doctoral dissertation. Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University; 1991.
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