I read the article Music as Medicine by Amy Novotney. This article talks about how there are researchers exploring music therapy to try to improve the health of infants along with people that have depression and Parkinson’s disease. It is said that music can help not just a person’s mood, but also their overall well-being. The participants used in this study were 272 premature infants that were 32 week gestation or older, 42 children age three to eleven from a pediatric emergency room, and 40 Parkinson’s disease patients.
The researchers started off using the premature infants. The babies had to listen to three different types of music; there was a lullaby sang by the child’s parents, an ocean disk, and a round instrument, the gato box, mimicking the sound that a baby hears inside the womb. It was found that all three of the sounds lowered the babies’ heart rates, however, the parents singing was most effective. The sound of the parents singing also increased the amount of time the babies were quiet and alert.
The ocean disk helped put the baby to sleep and the gato box helped improve the sucking behavior the most. The next test was to reduce pain and stress in children’s lives. The children would listen to soothing music or nothing at all while getting an IV inserted. The kids who had the soothing music playing while getting the IV inserted were reported to have significantly less pain than those who had no music at all. The third test that was to be done was healing via vibration.
This test was to be done on people who have Parkinson’s to see if sound vibrations can help ease the symptoms of the disease. The 40 Parkinson’s disease patients were put into a room to with low-frequency-30-hertz vibration for a minute, and then had a minute break from it, which alternated for ten minutes. Doing this led to improvements in symptoms such as reduced tremors, faster walking with bigger steps, and less rigidity. It turns out that music can, in fact, help ones health in one way or another. Certain sounds can help different things.
I believe that this is important to our psychology class because it relates to the function of the brain, especially when talking about Parkinson’s disease. Researchers are now looking further into that by researching thalmocortical dysrhythmia, which is a disorientation of rhythmic brain activity involving the thalamus and outer cortex. It is found in people with depression, Parkinson’s, fibromyalgia and maybe even in Alzheimer’s disease. I find this to be very important especially since I know people under one or more of these categories.