• Posted October 18, 2024

Music Might Speed Your Recovery From Surgery

Pop tunes, smooth jams and banging beats can help people more easily recover from surgery with fewer painkillers, a new review finds.

Listening to music reduces the anxiety, pain and heart rate of patients waking up from surgery, researchers found.

As a result, surgical patients provided music tended to need less than half the amount of morphine required by those who weren’t listening to tunes.

“When patients wake up after surgery, sometimes they feel really scared and don’t know where they are,” said senior researcher Dr. Eldo Frezza, a professor of surgery at California Northstate University College of Medicine.

“Music can help ease the transition from the waking up stage to a return to normalcy and may help reduce stress around that transition,” Frezza added.

For the review, researchers analyzed the pooled data from 35 prior studies on music and its role in recovery from surgery.

Patients who listened to music had significant reductions in pain and anxiety the day after surgery, the data showed.

“Although we can’t specifically say they’re in less pain, the studies revealed that patients perceive they are in less pain, and we think that is just as important,” said lead researcher Shehzaib Raees, a third-year medical student at the California Northstate University College of Medicine.

“When listening to music, you can disassociate and relax,” Raees said. “In that way, there’s not much you have to do or focus on, and you can calm yourself down.”

Patients with music also had a lower heart rate, which can improve recovery by allowing effective circulation of oxygen and nutrients throughout the body, researchers said.

The findings were presented Friday at the American College of Surgeons annual meeting in San Francisco. Such research should be considered preliminary until published in a peer-reviewed journal.

Researchers think that listening to music causes a reduction in levels of cortisol, the stress hormone.

Further, music can be added to a recovery room without much cost or effort, they noted. The researchers added that the best music for a patient likely is whatever they enjoy most.

“We’re not trying to say that one type of music is better than another,” Frezza said in a journal news release. “We think music can help people in different ways after surgery because music can be comforting and make you feel like you’re in a familiar place.”

More information

Harvard Medical School has more on music as medicine.

SOURCE: American College of Surgeons, news release, Oct. 18, 2024