Music could be an inexpensive way to make people more comfortable after surgery
Dragos Condrea/Alamy
Listening to music after surgery appears to reduce pain and anxiety in patients, and this could be a cheap and easy way to reduce painkiller use.
“Many people get lost when they wake up from anesthesia,” says Eldo Frezza of the California Northstate University School of Medicine. “They may have anxiety or feel the pain of surgery.”
Studies have repeatedly shown that music has a calming effect, which led Frezza and colleagues to investigate whether music might be helpful after surgery.
The research team analyzed the results of 35 studies that investigated how listening to music immediately after surgery affected people’s pain, anxiety, heart rate, and pain medication use.
Each study involved around 100 people, half of whom were asked to listen to different genres of music after abdominal or bone-related surgery. In the study, the amount of time participants listened to music varied from 30 minutes to the time they left the hospital.
The remaining participants (matched in age, gender, and type of surgery to the former group) did not listen to music after surgery.
Presenting the results at the American College of Surgeons Conference in San Francisco, California, Frezza’s team found that music appeared to reduce participants’ pain levels by about 20 percent, on average. (self-reported on a 20-point scale). Those who listened to music also required less than half the amount of morphine during their hospitalization compared to those who did not listen to music.
The research team also found that listening to music seemed to reduce anxiety. This reduced heart rate by about 4.5 beats per minute on average and self-reported anxiety levels by about 2.5 points on a scale of 20 to 80. We want to eliminate that,” Heiderscheid says.
According to Annie Heiderscheidt of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK, music shifts our focus away from pain and makes us feel better by increasing levels of a signaling molecule called serotonin that passes between brain cells. He says he will give it to me. It can also distract you from anxious thoughts, she says. This could be a cheap and easy way for hospitals to help patients recover after surgery, she says.
Future research should include larger studies in which people undergoing the same type of surgery at about the same time are randomly assigned to listen to music or not listen to music after surgery, Frezza said. He says this will yield more reliable results than combining results from previous smaller studies.
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