Music is a gift of health, no matter what the type.
Melodies and rhythms are being used everywhere today, from delivery rooms to nursing homes. They're helping preemies go home earlier and stroke victims walk better.
Music, the experts say, heals.
"More often than not, music can be used as a treatment tool," says Al Bumanis, a spokesman for the American Music Therapy Association.
On the simplest level, he says, music can work as a distraction when we're in pain or under great stress. But research increasingly suggests that "it's deeper than that," he says.
Take the Journal of the American Medical Association from earlier this year, which described the premature babies who showed improvement when they'd regularly heard lullabies and received massages. The girls in the group left the hospital 11 days sooner than those who hadn't had this special treatment, the report says, while the boys left a day sooner.
And both boys and girls who'd heard music and received massages weighed more than the preemies that hadn't, and they also showed higher oxygen saturation levels, the study says.
Some researchers believe that listening to music may give our immune systems a bump, Bumanis says. For instance, a study by Deforia Lane, director of music therapy at University Hospitals in Cleveland, Ohio, showed that just a half-hour of music therapy increased kids' levels of a particular antibody, salivary IgA, he says.
But not just kids' health is benefiting from music. Increasingly, Bumanis says, music therapy is being used to help treat people with Alzheimer's or other types of dementia.
People who don't respond to other therapies sometimes respond to music, experts say, perhaps because it feels familiar and predictable and can evoke feelings of security.
A wife of a man with Alzheimer's described, on the association's Web site, the efforts of a music therapist who encouraged her to sing to her husband. As she put it, he had "been lost in the fog of Alzheimer's disease for so many years." Her husband looked at her and seemed to recognize her and, on the last day of his life, "he opened his eyes and looked into mine when I sang his favorite hymn," the woman writes.
Researchers at the Center for Biomedical Research in Music at Colorado State University are marching in an entirely different direction with their use of rhythm in therapy, as reported in another issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
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