Here’s why you should listen to music post surgery

“Cognitive activities such as listening to music can affect perceived intensity and unpleasantness of pain, enabling patients’ sensation of pain to be reduced”. For example, studies have primarily focused on how music impacts patients’ recovery following specific types of surgery.

Even though music is non-invasive, safe and low-priced, it isn’t routinely used around the time of surgery, perhaps because of ignorance or skepticism about its effectiveness, a previous Dutch study suggested. Researchers form Queen Mary University of London have discovered that patients who listened to music before and after their surgery required less pain relievers.

Writing in a linked Comment, Dr Paul Glasziou from Bond University, Queensland, Australia says, “Music is a simple and cheap intervention, which reduces transient discomforts for many patients undergoing surgery”. Also, when patients selected their own music there was a slightly greater reduction in pain and use of pain relief, though it was non-significant. The Huffington Post also reported that studies show how music helps the body consume oxygen more efficiently while exercising. He says there’s an opportunity for more research on how to maximise the benefits of music for surgery.

My colleagues and I wanted to assess this evidence so that we could highlight the potential for music in surgical recovery. In a 2010 study led by Boston University Nicholas Simmons-Stern, results showed that Alzheimer’s patients better recalled song lyrics when they were sung rather than spoken.

“When patients select the music, it has more of an impact than when the doctor does”, Dr.Rafael Alexander Ortiz, director of interventional neuroradiology and stroke at Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City, told CBS News. “What we would like to do is get this information into patient information leaflets so when people are coming for elective surgery along with their pyjamas and slippers, they bring in their music player and headphones”.

The effects extend even while the patient is under general anaesthetic and therefore asleep.

The team are following up this research with a pilot scheme of introducing music into operative settings at The Royal London Hospital.

As published in the “Lancet“, the study said that playing music during the surgery was effective even when the patients were under general anesthesia. However, it’s taken pulling together all the small studies on this subject into one robust meta-analysis to really prove it works’.