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 this 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 studies, the amount of time participants did this 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 their results at the American College of Surgeons Conference in San Francisco, California, Frezza’s team found that music reduces pain levels by about 20 percent on average, based on self-reports using a scale of 20 to 80. I discovered that it seems to. Those who listened to music required less than half the amount of morphine during their hospital stay than those who did not.
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.
“A 2.5 percentage point drop is quite small, but it’s going in the direction we want,” said Annie Heiderscheidt of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England.
Music shifts our focus away from pain, makes us feel better, and distracts us from anxious thoughts by increasing levels of a signaling molecule called serotonin that passes between brain cells. You can, she says. This could be a cheap and easy way for hospitals to help patients recover after surgery, Heiderscheid said.
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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