Nurse Rod Salaysay performs guitar for affected person Richard Hoang within the restoration unit of UC San Diego Well being in San Diego, Calif., on Sept. 30, 2025. Credit score: AP Picture/Javier Arciga
Nurse Rod Salaysay works with every kind of devices within the hospital: a thermometer, a stethoscope and generally his guitar and ukulele.
Within the restoration unit of UC San Diego Well being, Salaysay helps sufferers handle ache after surgical procedure. Together with drugs, he provides tunes on request and generally sings. His repertoire ranges from folks songs in English and Spanish to Minuet in G Main and film favorites like “Somewhere Over the Rainbow.”
Sufferers typically smile or nod alongside. Salaysay even sees modifications of their important indicators like decrease coronary heart charge and blood strain, and a few might request fewer painkillers.
“There’s often a cycle of worry, pain, anxiety in a hospital,” he mentioned, “but you can help break that cycle with music.”
Salaysay is a one-man band, however he isn’t alone. Over the previous twenty years, stay performances and recorded music have flowed into hospitals and medical doctors’ workplaces as analysis grows on how songs may help ease ache.
Scientists discover how music impacts ache notion
The therapeutic energy of tune might sound intuitive given music’s deep roots in human tradition. However the science of whether or not and the way music dulls acute and persistent ache—technically referred to as music-induced analgesia—is simply catching up.
Nobody suggests {that a} catchy tune can absolutely eradicate critical ache. However a number of latest research, together with within the journals Ache and Scientific Stories, have recommended that listening to music can both scale back the notion of ache or improve an individual’s potential to tolerate it.
What appears to matter most is that sufferers—or their households—select the music choices themselves and hear intently, not simply as background noise.
How music can have an effect on ache ranges
“Pain is a really complex experience,” mentioned Adam Hanley, a psychologist at Florida State College. “It’s created by a physical sensation, and by our thoughts about that sensation and emotional reaction to it.”
Two folks with the identical situation or harm might really feel vastly totally different ranges of acute or persistent ache. Or the identical individual would possibly expertise ache otherwise from someday to the following.
Acute ache is felt when ache receptors in a selected a part of the physique—like a hand touching a scorching range—ship alerts to the mind, which processes the short-term ache. Persistent ache often includes long-term structural or different modifications to the mind, which heighten general sensitivity to ache alerts. Researchers are nonetheless investigating how this happens.
“Pain is interpreted and translated by the brain,” which can ratchet the sign up or down, mentioned Dr. Gilbert Chandler, a specialist in persistent spinal ache on the Tallahassee Orthopedic Clinic.
Researchers know music can draw consideration away from ache, lessening the feeling. However research additionally counsel that listening to most popular music helps uninteresting ache greater than listening to podcasts.
“Music is a distractor. It draws your focus away from the pain. But it’s doing more than that,” mentioned Caroline Palmer, a psychologist at McGill College who research music and ache.
Scientists are nonetheless tracing the assorted neural pathways at work, mentioned Palmer.
“We know that almost all of the brain becomes active when we engage in music,” mentioned Kate Richards Geller, a registered music therapist in Los Angeles. “That changes the perception and experience of pain—and the isolation and anxiety of pain.”
Music genres and lively listening
The concept of utilizing recorded music to reduce ache related to dental surgical procedure started within the late nineteenth century earlier than native anesthetics had been obtainable. Right this moment researchers are finding out what circumstances make music only.
Researchers at Erasmus College Rotterdam within the Netherlands carried out a examine on 548 members to see how listening to 5 genres of music—classical, rock, pop, city and digital—prolonged their potential to face up to acute ache, as measured by publicity to very chilly temperatures.
All music helped, however there was no single profitable style.
“The more people listened to a favorite genre, the more they could endure pain,” mentioned co-author Dr. Emy van der Valk Bouman. “A lot of people thought that classical music would help them more. Actually, we are finding more evidence that what’s best is just the music you like.”
The precise causes are nonetheless unclear, however it might be as a result of acquainted songs activate extra recollections and feelings, she mentioned.
The straightforward act of selecting is itself highly effective, mentioned Claire Howlin, director of the Music and Well being Psychology Lab at Trinity School Dublin, who co-authored a examine that recommended permitting sufferers to pick songs improved their ache tolerance.
“It’s one thing that people can have control over if they have a chronic condition—it gives them agency,” she mentioned.
Lively, centered listening additionally appears to matter.
Hanley, the Florida State psychologist, co-authored a preliminary examine suggesting day by day attentive listening would possibly scale back persistent ache.
“Music has a way of lighting up different parts of the brain,” he mentioned, “so you’re giving people this positive emotional bump that takes their mind away from the pain.”
It is a easy prescription with no unwanted side effects, some medical doctors now say.
Cecily Gardner, a jazz singer in Culver Metropolis, California, mentioned she used music to assist get by means of a critical sickness and has sung to associates battling ache.
“Music reduces stress, fosters community,” she mentioned, “and just transports you to a better place.”
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