Music therapy: do you know its benefits?

The music therapy is defined like: “the use of the music, or the elements that shape it, used on an individual (or group) with the target to improve its quality of life attending on emotional, cognitive and social needs.”

How does the music therapy work?

Depending on every person and its needs a qualified musicoterapeuta is in charge of providing the treatment to be continued. The music therapy includes from: to create music, to sing, to move and / or to listen to music. MelodyGardot, one of the big personalities of the current jazz, suffered a serious accident at the age of 19 that kept her incomer several months in the hospital. It had lost the memory to shortly and medium term, and the aptitude to speak and to walk with normality. The doctors driven to despair by its slow recovery, suggested him to use the music to create connections again neuronales and recover the above mentioned skills. Some months later it composed its first disc, which threw it to the reputation.

Although this history does not stop being an anecdote, the music therapy has used in several hospitals, like the Hospital La Paz of Madrid or the Hospital Sant Joan of Déu of Barcelona. It takes as a target to stimulate or to relax the incomer patient, as well as to facilitate to him the communication, the mobility and learning of lost or not acquired skills. The power of the music has always fascinated the human being.Pitágoras was already attributing curative properties to him, and Platón was thinking that “The music is for the soul what the gymnastics for the body”.

Two thousand years later, the modern medicine keeps on making use of the music to help children and adults to satisfy physical, cognitive, emotional and social needs.

The good thing is that it is not necessary to have musical knowledge to enjoy the therapeutic benefits of the music: already in the maternal belly, from the week 20 of gestation, we are capable of hearing these combinations of musical notes that have the power to move sensations or to change to us the humor, and that also they can influence in our health.

Benefits of the music therapy

Multiple studies have observed that to listen to certain type of music of regular form diminishes the cardiac frequency and the arterial tension, it is good for the stress and has positive effects in different cardiovascular diseases in adults. But the benefits of the musicoterapia spread not only to the heart, but also to the brain and to the immune system. Also it has been demonstrated that it improves the depression, the insomnia, and even physical symptoms in patients with cancer or in children joined the pediatric UCI. Also, it is possible to use before applying invasive procedures or surgery, for the aptitude of the music to diminish the sensation of pain and the anxiety.

The practice of a musical instrument, for example, reduces the effects of the mental deterioration in patients with Alzheimer’s disease. The investigators also have thought that this support skill can improve the independence, creativity, self-esteem, and communication in children with autism or with Syndrome of Williams: the musicoterapia, making use that these children usually have a special affinity and talent for the music, it uses skills of musical improvisation that helps them to express feelings and emotions that it finds it hard to them to communicate verbally, facilitating this way its social integration.

This therapy exempt from side effects can improve the life in some cases in which the medicines are not completely effective, therefore it is a resource with which it is worth while being provided. The musical supreme beauty to our life and also, as Cervantes said, “who sings, its evil frightens”. Brave for the music!

Dra. Aida Hernández Blanco

Pediatrician specialist in Infantile Cardiology and ecocardiografía fetal Instructor of Revival Pediatric Cardiopulmonar Avanzada and neonatal