Music can be an inexpensive way to help people feel more comfortable after surgery.
Dragos Condrea/Alami
Listening to music after surgery appears to ease patients’ pain and anxiety, which could be a cheap and easy way to reduce pain medication use.
“A lot of people are lost when they wake up from anesthesia,” he says. Eldo Frezza from California Northstate University School of Medicine. “They may feel anxious or in pain from the surgery.”
Studies have repeatedly shown that: music can be soothingThis led Frezza and his colleagues to investigate whether it could help after surgery.
The research team analyzed the results of 35 studies that looked at how listening to this music immediately after surgery affected people’s pain, anxiety, heart rate, and painkiller use.
Each study involved about 100 people, half of whom were asked to listen to different genres of music after undergoing abdominal or bone-related surgery. Studies varied the length of time participants performed this task, from 30 minutes to discharge.
The remaining participants, who were matched to the previous group based on age, gender, and type of surgery, did not listen to music after the procedure.
Frezza’s team, who presented their results at the American College of Surgeons meeting in San Francisco, California, found that music reduced pain levels by an average of about 20 percent, according to self-report using a scale from 20 to 80. People who listened to music needed less than half the amount of morphine while in the hospital compared to those who didn’t.
The research team also found that listening to music seemed to reduce anxiety. On average, they lowered their heart rate by about 4.5 beats per minute and their self-reported anxiety levels decreased by about 2.5 points on a scale of 20 to 80.
“A 2.5-point decrease is very small, but it’s moving in the direction we want to go,” he says. Annie Heiderscheit at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK.
Music takes our focus away from pain. Increasing levels of a signaling molecule called serotonin She says it can also pass between brain cells to make us feel good and distract us from anxious thoughts. This could be a cheap and easy way for hospitals to help patients recover after surgery, Heiderscheit says.
Future research should include larger studies that randomly assign people undergoing the same type of surgery at about the same time to listen to music after surgery, Frezza says. This would provide more reliable results than combining the results of previous smaller studies, he said.
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