According to a recent research from University Hospitals (UH) Connor Whole Health, patients with moderate-to-severe pain, stress, or anxiety treated at UH community hospitals saw clinically significant decreases in pain, tension, and anxiety after only one session of music therapy.
Furthermore, the clinically meaningful effect on pain was unaffected by the patients’ demographic or clinical features, indicating that music therapy can be helpful for acute pain treatment in a variety of inpatient adult groups. The study’s findings were recently published in the journal Pain Reports.
Researchers from UH Connor Whole Health examined the first music therapy interventions provided to 1,056 adults receiving inpatient medical care who reported pre-session pain, anxiety, and/or stress scores greater than or equal to 4 on a 0 to 10 numeric rating scale in this retrospective study conducted between January 2017 and July 2020.
Unlike previous studies of music therapy, which were mostly done at academic medical institutions, this is the first and largest assessment of music therapy’s real-world efficacy in community medical centers.
“Music therapists at UH Connor Whole Health provide non-pharmacological frontline treatment throughout our medical system, addressing stress, pain, and anxiety.” Greater Cleveland residents may get these therapies as a clinical service line delivering direct evidence-based community benefit during hospitalizations at UH,” said Seneca Block, The Lauren Rich Fine Endowed Director of Expressive Therapies at UH Connor Whole Health.
With 11 board-certified music therapists collaborating with clinicians across the system to assist patients and their families manage the physical and emotional toll of sickness or hospitalization, UH Connor Whole Health operates the largest health system-based music therapy program in the United States. Furthermore, UH Connor Whole Health offers a wide range of integrative health and medical modalities, including acupuncture, chiropractic, and integrative medicine consulting, all of which are oriented on the patients’ overall well-being.
In “Effectiveness of Music Therapy within Community Hospitals: An EMMPIRE Retrospective Study,” researchers investigated variables associated with pain reduction of greater than or equal to 2 units on a 0 to 10 unit numeric rating scale at eight UH community medical centers.
To address patients’ needs such as pain management, coping, stress reduction, and anxiety reduction, music therapists delivered therapies such as live music listening, music-assisted relaxation and visualization, and active music creating. Music therapists assessed patients’ self-reported pain, stress, and anxiety on a 0 to 10 scale at the beginning and conclusion of each session as part of clinical treatment and documented their sessions in the electronic health record.
“What distinguishes this study is our ability to automate data collection from music therapy clinical practice to the electronic health record.” “We can then use these data to understand the real-world impact of music therapy across multiple medical centers, as well as how to best tailor music therapy interventions to meet patients’ needs,” said Sam Rodgers-Melnick, a music therapist and co-investigator on the EMMPIRE project (Effectiveness of Medical Music Therapy Practice: Integrative Research Using the Electronic Health Record).
“Routine collection of patient-reported outcomes from clinical practice (also known as practice-based research) is becoming increasingly common as a patient-centered quality of care measure,” said Dusek.
Prior study has shown that pain reductions of at least 1.3 units on the numeric rating scale are clinically significant in patients with non-cancer pain, implying that the symptom reduction constitutes a substantial difference in people with moderate-to-severe symptoms. Stress and anxiety reductions of at least 2 units are also regarded clinically significant.
Patients in this trial experienced clinically significant mean decreases in pain (2.04 units), anxiety (2.80 units), and stress (3.48 units) after receiving music therapy, with all changes above clinically significant criteria. Furthermore, 14% of patients with pain scores higher than or equal to 4 fell asleep during music therapy sessions, which is significant given the sleep issues that patients with moderate-to-severe pain confront during hospitalization.
Furthermore, after controlling for demographic, clinical, and operational factors, patients who received a music therapy session with a pain management goal were 4.32 times more likely to report pain reduction greater than or equal to 2 units than patients who received a music therapy session with no pain management goal.
“This finding raises important questions regarding how music therapists tailor their interventions to address pain when that is the goal of the session,” said Rodgers-Melnick, “and we will be examining these specific features of music therapy interventions in future research.”
“Music therapy provides an alternative but very effective mechanism for managing a patient’s discomfort,” Donald DeCarlo, MD, MBA, Chief Medical Officer of UH East Market, noted.
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