Music and Mediation Therapy - Essay Example

?Running head: Music and Meditation Therapy Music and Meditation Therapy s Music and Meditation Therapy Introduction Patients about to undergo surgery are definitely very anxious about it and after the procedure is done they feel the pain. This anxiety and pain can be reduced if appropriate medication and treatments are administered to the patients. This can be pharmacologically or non-pharmacologically done. One such non-pharmacological treatment is through music and meditation. It is said that these two therapies are very useful and some researchers, as discussed later in this paper, prove that these therapies are actually more beneficial without any side effects. This research paper will discuss these two therapies and talk about its advantages and how they have proven to be beneficial. For this purpose a literature review was conducted of the relevant journal articles to find out the information and apply it to this paper. Sciencedirect.com was the main resource for the articles. This research was qualitative in nature as statistics were not part of the research; rather, the information in themes and trends was considered. The Main Body It is recommended that non-pharmacological methods should be used for any purpose till they prove to be useful. Similar is the case with patents having to cope with surgical procedures. The pre-surgery anxiety and the post-operative pain that they have to experience may be overcome by music and meditation as it reduces stress anxiety and pain. Besides, such therapies are better for the patient since they have no side effects neither do they carry any risks of using them. Meditation Therapy Meditation is a state of awareness of the present without thinking. When we are normally thinking we usually replay or regret the past or worry about the future. However, during meditation such is not the case and during this process the person is only focusing on the present moment. Therefore, the person is just thinking about the wonders he has as of that very moment and thus there is no interference. When one is meditating he is not doing or thinking anything; he is just being. Meditation is a healing practice and can be safely incorporated into medical practice. Meditation is a completely free healing process which gives great advantages without having the risk of any kind of adverse side effects (Weiss, 2008). Therefore, it is much better than medication and needs to be practiced more often. Also, those who regularly meditate report hat they feel happy, fresh, at peace and free. Meditation Therapy for Anxiety and Pain Meditation is said to reduce blood pressure, heart rate and heart rhythm disturbances. This allows for adrenaline levels in blood to go down and this hormone is responsible for mediating emotional arousal in our body. There are two kinds of most basic and common meditation practices: transcendental meditation and mindfulness meditation. In the first process the meditator continuously repeats a single word which is called a mantra and he has to make his feelings and thinking to go away. The second process involves the person focusing all his attention on his thoughts and sensations and this process is normally for stress-reduction. Guided meditation is a kind of meditation using phrases of evocative spoken images which allow the person’s mind to become relaxed. Blue Shield insurance company conducted a research and their findings suggested that the surgery patients who listened to a guided meditation prior to surgery had a better recovery, was more cost efficient and they felt an improved sense of healing (Weiss, 2008). Another report, by the University of Massachusetts Stress Reduction Clinic showed a reduction in chronic pain by average 50%. In fact, the follow up studies reported that this pain reduction lasted for more than a year. Such effects result because meditation promotes the positive sites of the mind which include compassion, sympathy, big-heartedness, love, endurance and forbearance; therefore, allowing the meditator to heal from stress and pain. Meditation, thus, is an integral part of the physical healing process. Just anyone can meditate and for that the person has to change his brainwave state to theta in order to relax and to alpha to rest. When the brain rhythm slows down such it makes the heart, metabolism and breathing to also slow down and therefore the blood pressure also goes down. During meditation endorphins are released in our body which are natural painkillers. Music therapy Pain therapy is not an alternative to the pain medications. Rather it is to be used as an adjuvant to the existing medications where either the efficiency of such medication is increased many fold by using music or the side effect profile is improved by lowering the dosages given. Although relaxation exercises are another means through which a patient can be relaxed music works better as it has more advantages. Music motivates a person and improves his mood and allows for the promotion of relaxing feelings (McCaffrey & Good, 2000). It is believed that music releases endorphins and changes catecholamine levels in such ways that the patient feels relieved from pain his blood pressure heart rate respiratory rate oxygen consumption and serum lactic acid levels all go down (Wong, Lopez-Nahas, & Molassiotis, 2001). Several studies have established the therapeutic value that music holds and these studies involved hospitalized patents to investigate that. For instance, it was found that music distracts patients when they are in such an environment that they find unfriendly and strange like hospital. Music allows them to become comfortable and familiar with the environment and conditions they have to face (Wong, Lopez-Nahas, & Molassiotis, 2001). A research by (Good, Anderson, Ahn, Cong, & Stanton-Hicks, 2005) found that the patient participants in their research used music for different purposes; 27% of them used music for relaxation; 21% for distraction from pain; and 52% for both. 71% found music to be sedating. Music therapy for pain and anxiety Postoperative pain is certainly very uncomfortable and it can very easily worsen the stress response ultimately leading to problems in appetite and sleep and interfering with the patient’s health and may be even prolonging his hospital stay. The basis of using music therapy for managing pain comes from the fact that pain in itself is a subjective term and has its roots deeply intertwined with one’s emotions. So pain affects our emotions and likewise our emotions can change the pain sensation. Music takes on a multi prong approach while relieving pain. First of these that we should include in our discussion is reducing the amount of pain that is perceived by the brain. It achieves this by diverting our attention or to be more specific by making one focus more on something other than the pain stimulus. The theory is called Pain gate theory. Here we must also take into account the quality of music as well as the different kinds of music that appeal to different people. This is important because through research it was noticed that pain therapy was more effective when patients were given a choice to select the genre that they wanted to listen to. Because diverting of the focus from pain is the mainstay of music therapy patients tend to focus more on the music when they are interested in what they are listening to. This can also be explained by the gate theory, as more the patient is familiar to a certain type of music the more will there be receptiveness and preference by the gates over the pain stimulus. From the reports of the patients it was found that they use music for relaxing and for distraction from pain (Good, Stanton-Hicks, Grass, Anderson, Makii, & Geras, 2000); this allowed for diminishing of muscle and mental tension. When attention is being given to a particular idea or thing the prefrontal cortex is alerted to the sound (could be music or relaxation instructions) instead of to that input which may be causing anxiety and thus this allows for pain inhibition. It has been found that the patients going to go through surgery, for maybe coronary artery disease (CAD) and valvular heart disease (VHD), start experiencing anxiety as early as when they actually decide they need a surgery and this anxiety remains with them even until 3 months have passed followed surgery (Burg, Benedetto, Posenberg, & Soufer, 2003). When patients are hospitalized for surgery they become even more susceptible to the stressors around in their environment. These could be cold temperatures, noise, bright lights, pain and discomfort. The surgical outcome of a postoperative patient and the duration he has to stay at the hospital is usually affected by how anxious the patient is. From the research of (Vetrhus, Soreide, Eide, Solhaug, Nesvik, & Sondenaa, 2004) it was deduced that those patients undergoing cholecystectomy experienced higher postoperative pain who were more anxious as compared to those who were not. A similar proposition was found by (Caumo, Ferreir, & Cardoso, 2003) whose research showed that the more the postoperative anxiety is in a patient the more he would feel the pain and thus his recovery would also be negatively affected. (Cooke, Charboyer, & Hiratos, 2005) came to a conclusion that music is a very simple and cheap intervention which could allow for a reduction in anxiety having a huge effect upon the clinical practice and it is only now that evidence for such a phenomenon has started emerging. The theory behind the use of music for relieving anxiety is that it is said to have the ability of relaxing a person by means of the autonomic nervous system. The auditory stimulation of music occupies several neurotransmitters and thus when anxiety and similar feelings are diverted the person feels more positive (Thaut, 1990). From the argument that (Thaut, 1990) has proposed it can be concluded that music stimuli mediate perceptual responses. Such responses have an effect on feeling states and these effects may be such that they promote feelings of anxiety and stress reduction. (Magill-Levreault, 1993), however, suggests that music is the means through which a person feels relaxed both physically and mentally; and this is possible because the person’s attention is refocused to pleasurable feelings. Besides this, the patients are better able to pass their time while listening to music as they have something to focus on that relaxes them and time passes before they even realize it (Guzzetta, 1995). The research by (Bringman, Giesecke, Thorne, & Bringman, 2009) demonstrated that relaxing music actually diminished pre-surgery anxiety even more than midazolam does. This was the first research which showed such a finding that a non-pharmacological treatment can prove to be a better anxiolytic as compared to midazolam. Besides that their research found no side effects in the patents bang relieved used music while those who were administered midazolam became very sedated. Also music did not result in any kind of a post-operative hangover. Conclusion Almost every patient about to undergo surgery goes experiences anxiety. Music listening and meditation tends to efficiently solve this problem and it is an anxiolytic agent for the patients going to have postoperative CABG and valvular surgery. Because such therapies are able to greatly diminish anxiety in such patients it has implications for nursing. It is the duty of the nurses to make sure that their patients are comfortable and in the best possible environment as that would allow for a quicker recovery. A suggestion put forward by (Watson, 2005) said that it was necessary for a patient to be living in personalized and beautiful surroundings as that helps them to recover. Nurses can confidently use music listening and teach meditation to patients in order to provide their surgery patients with a nice environment that promotes healing. When there is appropriate music in the environment the patients recovering from surgery feel less anxious and the music reassures them and assists them in waking up from anesthesia calmly and properly and ready for immediate extubation. Music and meditation, being a nursing intervention, are very non-invasive and safe therapies that can be cost-effectively used for a patient’s wellbeing. When nurses use such therapies for such patients it allows for the promotion of nursing autonomy and this leads to the nurses being able to affect the environment in which their patient is. Recommendations From recent studies (Lee, Henderson, & Shum, 2004) it may be concluded that music indeed did lead to reduced preoperative anxiety in the patients having outpatient and day surgery. However, there is a need to consider what the patient’s preference is as far as the genre and type of music is concerned. This is because there is a possible risk of music becoming routinized rather than being used for the patient as a nursing intervention. Thus it would be helpful if the practicality of music being an independent nursing intervention is included in nursing curricula. There is a requirement of further research to be conducted for determining how music and meditation affects patients going through a particular kind of a surgery. If the findings from those researches show that such therapies are actually helpful for many different kinds of surgery patients and helps them during the surgery and for recovery there could be a demonstration project that would show how patients can be recovered quicker and better through music and meditation in acute care surgical areas. Lastly, nurses could be taught how these therapies can benefit their patients and their advantages can be part of their formal nursing programs. Use of music can be included in their education and this would certainly help them to feel more comfortable in the way they can use music for surgical patients while in surgery and later on. References Bally, K., Campbell, D., Chesnick, K., & Tranmer, J. (2003). Effects of patient-controlled music therapy during coronary angiography on procedural pain and anxiety distress syndrome. Critical Care Nurse, 23, 50-58. Bonica, J. J. (1979). The need of a taxonomy. Pain, 6(3), 247–252. Bringman, H., Giesecke, K., Thorne, A., & Bringman, S. (2009). Relaxing music as pre-medication before surgery: a randomised controlled trial. Acta Anaesthesiol Scand, 53, 759–764. Brunges, M., & Avigne, G. (2003). Music therapy for reducing surgical anxiety. AORN Journal, 816–818. Burg, M., Benedetto, C., Posenberg, R., & Soufer, R. (2003). Presurgical anxiety and depression predict medical morbidity 6 months after coronary artery bypass surgery. Psychosomatic Medicine, 65, 111–118. 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