Music Therapy Found to Aid Spine Surgery Patients

Updated on Jun 30, 2022 | Featured, Your Health

Researchers at the Louis Armstrong Center for Music and Medicine and the Department of Orthopaedic Surgery at Mount Sinai Beth Israel found in a recent study that music therapy—an integrative treatment that addresses mind, body, and spirit—decreased the perceived pain of patients recovering from spine surgery.

“Our aim was to substantiate years of evidence-based reporting on the benefits of music therapy,” says John Mondanaro, MA, LCAT, MT-BC, Clinical Director, Louis and Lucille Armstrong Music Therapy Program, Mount Sinai Beth Israel, and the senior author of the study, which was published in the January/February 2017 issue of The American Journal of Orthopedics. The principal investigator was Joanne V. Loewy, DA, LCAT, MT-BC, Director of the Louis Armstrong Center, which has been at the forefront of integrative medicine for the past 24 years, conducting numerous clinical trials with doctors and nurses as co-investigators.

The study, which was conducted from 2009 to 2014, involved 60 patients who had just undergone spinal fusion surgery, for which recovery is often extremely painful, Mr. Mondanaro says. The patients, who ranged from ages 40 to 55, were randomly divided into two groups: One group received a half-hour music therapy session plus standard care (medical and nursing care, with pain medication). And a control group received standard care only. Measurements for both groups were completed within 72 hours after each surgery, then about 30 minutes after the intervention.

Joanne V. Loewy, DA, and John Mondanaro, MA, co-investigators

The music therapy session provided the patient with guided breathing exercises accompanied by live music played by members of the team and selected to fit the patient’s preferences, such as jazz, pop, or classical.

“Patients had opportunities to release tension through clinical improvisation, where they played musical instruments and focused on themes related to their lives and their recovery,” Dr. Loewy says. The sessions ended with a relaxation exercise in which patients envisioned a place that brings them peace—“a beach, a park, their bed at home,” Mr. Mondanaro says. The control group and the music therapy group showed significant differences in pain as measured by the visual analog scale (VAS), in which zero is “no pain” and 10 is “worst pain imaginable.” Pain levels rose slightly in the control group, to 5.87 from 5.20, but fell by more than 1 point in the music group, to 5.09 from 6.20.

Although the results for the control and music therapy groups did not differ in hospital anxiety and kinesiophobia (a fear of movement that can impede recovery), the decrease in VAS pain levels was significant. Overall, the study concluded, “Conventional pain-alleviating medical interventions can be enhanced with integrative therapies that empower patients to marshal their inner resources during recovery. Music therapy may be particularly suited to this effort, as it is adaptable to the patient’s individual and culturally specific needs.”