Music Therapy
Almost every technologist practices music therapy with their patients and, if you are not, then I hope that after reading this section you will use this very effective CAM intervention more often. Throughout history, music has been recognized to have positive effects in reducing patient anxiety and promoting healing110. Music has been known to positively affect a person physiologically and psychologically, making it a cognitive-based intervention111. When patients are stressed, such as during an MRI exam, physiological changes occur, including an increase in blood pressure, heart rate, and levels of cortisol, and music has been shown to effectively decrease all of these112.
Music has been used as a tool to help patients reduce emotional stress in order to better tolerate stressful medical procedures including MRI112–114. Music is a commonly used cognitive intervention in the MRI environment to reduce anxiety in patients28,114. It has also been used to help pre-operative and post-operative surgical patients to reduce anxiety and several studies have shown it reduced blood pressure, heart rate, anxiety, and post-surgical pain111,115. Another study evaluated the effects music on oncology patients and concluded that it made them less anxious113. Patients reported the effect of the music as “relaxed and uplifting,” “soothing and relaxing,” “calmed my nerves,” and “felt calm and happy”113.
It should be noted that although music has successfully helped reduce anxiety in MRI patients, noise from the MRI machine may reduce the effectives of this intervention because music does not completely cancel out the machine’s noise29. Therefore, it is important to ensure the volume is high enough for the patient to hear. This is an important factor; a study conducted by McNulty and McNulty (2009) looked specifically at the negative effects of MRI and found noise to be a significant factor in patient anxiety.
Hint: When using music as an intervention, ensure the volume is high enough for the patient to hear over the machine noise, which is a significant factor in MRI anxiety.