CREDIT: JAYMIN PROULX
Music therapy brings something different to the hospital environment, and according to Karina Charczuk, it helps patients cope.

Have you downloaded any music lately? Played guitar? Attended a Zumba class?

Music may provide more benefits than we realize and impact our lives more than we know.

Though it keeps us connected to pop culture and is easily accessible by way of Internet, television or radio, music can also provide great benefits to heal the mind and body.

Patients with mental illness, dementia, Alzheimer’s or those with migraines have been seen to substantially recover with music. Methods include listening to relaxing music while colouring, playing a musical instrument, singing and relaxing or meditating while listening to calming sounds. In addition, patients also receive a great deal of enthusiasm when playing a musical instrument in a group setting or singing in a choir.

Karina Charczuk, a music therapist at the Children’s Hospital at the London Health Sciences Centre said the whole point of music therapy is to bring something different to the hospital environment and to help patients cope with all the medical procedures they are experiencing.

“It’s not necessarily meant to replace those medical procedures, but to help cope and compliment the treatment,” Charczuk said.

Charczuk explained in the case of infants, research shows when a pre-term infant, or an infant born before the 37-week gestation age, is exposed to music therapy, they don’t need as much sedation when it comes to procedures.

The same can be explained with pediatric patients. As a result, music therapy can replace the need for medical intervention, like sedatives, and thereby complement other methods of treatment.

“We work with premature infants up to individuals in old-age, with all different types of diagnoses,” Charczuk said. “I’ve personally worked in pediatrics and also with adults with mental health diagnoses, adults with drug and alcohol addiction and abuse, teens with acquired brain injury and with autism.”

And according to Charczuk, music therapy helps no matter what the age of the patient.

“Live music has shown to be more beneficial than recorded music, when provided by a music therapist. It has been shown to regulate heart rate, regulate breathing rate and increase non-nutritive sucking [in infants]. That’s something you want to see from an infant, that they are actually feeding from their mother.”

According to Charczuk, it increases the sucking rate and helps the bonding experience with the infant and caregiver.

Studies show that “kangaroo care”, the skin-on-skin contact that is encouraged between a caregiver and their infant, and music therapy combined, have shown to be more beneficial than just “kangaroo care” alone. That skin-on-skin contact reassures the baby and gets the infant to hear the mother’s voice. When the mother is relaxed, the baby relaxes as well.

In terms of the brain, neuroscientist Dr. Daniel Levitin, in his book This is Your Brain on Music: A Science Of A Human Obsession, wrote that Harvard neuroscientist Gottfried Schlaug found “musicians tended to have larger cerebellums than non-musicians, and an increased concentration of grey matter.”

“Grey matter is that part of the brain that contains cell bodies, axons and dendrites, and is understood to be responsible for information processing, as opposed to white matter, which is responsible for information transmission,” Levitin wrote.

The cerebellum is in the back of the brain and is important in motor control. Its function is to coordinate and regulate muscular activity.

In Healing at the Speed of Sound, by Don Campbell and Alex Doman, researchers observed “that merely listening to upbeat music in a style one likes causes the blood vessels to expand (thus increasing blood flow), improves breathing patterns and spurs increased production of endorphins, thus decreasing stress and creating overall feelings of well-being.”

On a different level, it also can have an opposite effect. Listening to music one doesn’t like causes the blood vessels to constrict, breathing to quicken and feelings of stress to increase.

“Prolonged exposure to unpleasant music or noise can negatively affect the immune system, speed the aging process, increase levels of anxiety and depression, contribute to infertility and impotence and increase the risk for heart attack and stroke,” wrote Campbell and Dorman.

With regards to therapy, Charczuk said that the beauty of music is that it is a non-verbal way to express how you are feeling.

“Teens don’t always like to talk about how they are feeling, or someone who is going through talk therapy with a psychiatrist or psychologist, they are always talking about how they are feeling and working through things. Music is that other modality that they can express themselves and tell you without telling you directly how they are feeling.”

A few methods that music therapists use with that type of population is a lot instrumental improvisation, no set song, just playing a beat that everyone can participate in.

“Someone creates a beat and you play off that beat. You get the expression of what a person is feeling through their playing because if you have no guide, you fall on different ways of inspiration or methods of playing on how you feel.”

Song sharing is another method music therapists like Charczuk use to help patients. Charczuk asks patients to play a song that they are really drawn to, talk about the lyrics and from the lyric analysis, she can see why that song is important to that person. Overall, this encourages open discussions about the patient’s feelings.

Campbell and Dorman explained that group music sessions involving any instrument and bodily movement display one of music’s most important qualities as a tool for rehabilitation. They illustrated in their book that playing music is so pleasurable that individuals are happy to engage in it for hours, days and months on end.

As a result, Campbell and Dorman concluded that doctors are finally learning what primitive healers have known for centuries.

“By using music, voice and rhythm to reach a part of themselves where they can no longer be afraid, patients can bring themselves back toward health.”

What’s another way to beat stress and meet people? Join a drumming circle. Fanshawe College has drumming circles on campus and these can be effective in helping people cope with stress from school. Drumming circles can also help those with neuromuscular disorders control their physical movements. Visit F2010 for more information.