E-Paper
The 'musical' link to post-surgery pain
When it comes to treating pain after surgery, music can be a good reliever, says a US study.
Medication may still be the best, but a new research has found that when it comes to treating pain after surgery, music can be a good reliever too, says a study published in the current issue of The Cochrane Library.
The study, by a team of researchers led by M. Soledad Cepeda, M.D, a professor at Javeriana University School of Medicine in Bogota, Colombia, and a faculty member of the anesthesia department at Tufts-New England Medical Center, was based on the culled results from 14 studies in which 489 surgery patients listened to prerecorded music.
The researchers found that not only did music also reduce the patients’ need for morphine-like drugs, but that patients who listened to music after surgery reported less pain than other patients who were not exposed to it.
Dr Cepeda said that though music therapy was only a theory before, the study helped to prove that music decreases analgesic requirements and decreases pain intensity for acute postoperative pain.
“Before we didn’t know if music worked. Now we know at least for acute postoperative pain that music decreases analgesic requirements and decreases pain intensity,” she said.
Ruth McCaffrey, an assistant professor in the nursing school at Florida Atlantic University, who was not involved in the Cochrane review, said that music therapy would prove to be helpful because it took patients’ mind off their pain.
“Especially in postperative pain, the patient may not be in control of getting their pain medication. They may have to push a button and wait for the nurse to come. If they can use the music while they are waiting it may reduce the anxiety, of ‘When is my pain medication coming?’” she said.
