Music Therapy: An Impactful Way to Support Patients

Music therapy can have a significant normalizing effect for patients like Omari, who receives regular music therapy services when he is not hospitalized.

Music activates cognitive, speech and motor centers in the brain, and it can be highly effective in influencing mood regulation and even pain perception. Music therapists can also affect physiological changes such as lowering heart rate or slowing respiration using techniques like musical entrainment. But what do we mean when we talk about the importance of facilitating “normalizing” experiences during a patient’s hospitalization, and how can music therapy support this?

While music therapy is a novel therapy to most of our patients, we frequently meet patients who receive regular music therapy services outside of the Mount Sinai Kravis Children’s Hospital. For these patients, musical engagement often holds ritual significance. It provides an immediate pathway through which rapport and a working relationship can be built. As a nonverbal modality, music therapy can transcend limitations of verbal comprehension and communication, sometimes touching the innermost parts of an individual and accessing those parts that bolster their sense of health and well-being, even when a person is physically, mentally and emotionally taxed. In other words, musical interaction can often be a direct path to feeling, well… normal.

Using musical engagement to contextualize a wide range of experiences, music therapists aim to support individuals over the course of their medical journey through transformation of the relationship they have to physical hospital space, and by “holding space” for the interpersonal relationships that are an integral part of how every family copes while in the hospital