Listening to music after surgery seems to be an effective pain reliever

Listening to music after surgery appears to ease patients’ pain and anxiety, which could be a cheap and easy way to reduce painkiller use.

“A lot of people, when they wake up from anesthesia, are lost,” says Eldo Frezza of California Northstate University College of Medicine. “They feel anxious or may have pain from the surgery.”

Studies have repeatedly shown that music can be calming, prompting Frezza and his colleagues to investigate whether music could help after surgery.

The team analyzed the results of 35 studies that explored how listening to music immediately after surgery affected pain, anxiety, heart rate and use of painkillers.

Each study involved about 100 people, half of whom were asked to listen to music, of different genres, after stomach or bone-related surgery. Studies vary on how long participants did this, ranging from half an hour until they were discharged from the hospital.

The remaining participants – who were matched to the previous group based on age, gender and type of surgery – listened to no music after their procedures.

Frezza’s team – who presented their results at the American College of Surgeons congress in San Francisco, California – found that music appeared to reduce pain levels by about 20 percent on average, according to self-reports that used a scale ranging from 20 to 80. Those who listened to music also required less than half the amount of morphine while in hospital than those who did not.

The team also found that listening to music seemed to reduce anxiety. This lowered heart rate by about 4.5 beats per minute on average, and reduced self-reported anxiety levels by about 2.5 points, also on a scale of 20 to 80.

“A drop of 2.5 points is quite small, but it is moving in the direction we want,” said Annie Heiderscheit of Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, England.

Music shifts our focus from pain by increasing levels of a signaling molecule called serotonin that passes through brain cells and makes us feel good, he says, and can also distract us from anxious thoughts. This could be a cheap and easy way for hospitals to help patients recover after surgery, Heiderscheit said.

Future research should include a large study in which people undergoing the same surgery at around the same time are randomly allocated whether or not to listen to music after the procedure, Frezza said. This will provide more reliable results than combining the results of previous small studies, he said.

Topic:

• music/
• operation

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