“This Won’t Hurt a Bit”: Is There a Role for Music in Bedside Procedures?

Abstract

Music has played a long and storied role in clinical healing. However, the integration of music into clinical practice has been slow to gain traction, despite a recent meta-analysis demonstrating association of music interventions with clinically meaningful improvements in health-related quality of life. There is growing evidence that music has an active role in reducing patient pain and anxiety as well as affecting physiologic parameters, such as heart rate and blood pressure, in an ICU setting. Past studies have shown that incorporation of music into procedures in the operating room, radiology suites, and catheterization labs has reduced concurrent pharmacologic sedation requirements. In the age of patient-centered personalized medicine, we propose a call to action to implement an easily accessible, attainable checklist item offering a personal choice of music for patients during standardized bedside procedural training, to reduce anxiety, pain, and pharmacologic sedation and potentially improve clinical outcomes.

The psychophysiology of music-based interventions and the experience of pain

“…For example in childbirth (e.g., Simavli et al, 2014;Maleki and Youseflu, 2023), dysmenorrhea (Martin-Saavedra and Ruiz-Sternberg, 2018), laparoscopy (Choi et al, 2023), orthopaedics (Lin et al, 2019;Yu et al, 2020), cancer (Chow et al, 2023;Huang and Huang, 2023), fibromyalgia (Guétin et al, 2012;Usui et al, 2020), dermatology (Riew et al, 2023) and pre-and postoperative care during cardiovascular (Voss et al, 2004;Nilsson, 2009;Wang et al, 2020;Chandrababu et al, 2021;Kakar et al, 2021) or abdominal surgery (e.g., Good et al, 2005;Dale, 2021). There is evidence of music providing pain relief in patients being treated for burns (Whitehead-Pleaux et al, 2007;Hsu et al, 2016;Wu et al, 2021), and for patients in emergency departments or intensive care units (Richard-Lalonde et al, 2020;See et al, 2023;Vijay and Hauser, 2023). In most of these examples the amelioration of aspects of the pain experience -especially any accompanying negative affect such as stress or anxiety -are also reduced, indicative of the multifactorial influence of music on human psychophysiology.…”