What is Music Therapy?
Sound Medicine That Heals, Uplifts and Offers Hope
Check out these emotional, spiritual and physical effects of music therapy. Music helps with the grieving process and can teach stroke victims to walk again.
Music therapy isn’t simply listening to a DVD and forgetting about life for awhile. It’s an actual discipline with trained therapists. Music therapists have four-year degrees and are accredited through organizations such as the Canadian Association for Music Therapy or the American Music Therapy Association.
What Is Music Therapy?
According to the American Music Therapy Association, music therapy is “music interventions to accomplish individualized goals within a therapeutic relationship by a credentialed professional who has completed an approved music therapy program.”
That’s the official definition. Unofficially, music therapy helps people deal with death, disease, behavior problems, developmental issues and psychological problems.
Benefits of Music Therapy
It's been practiced for centuries, but music therapy as sound medicine is a relatively new field of research. Asian doctors just discovered that Classical or Zen music may cure tinnitus (Channel News Asia, Sept 15, 2007). British scientists are studying the effects of music on the symptoms of schizophrenia; music may ease the depression, anxiety, and withdrawal that many schizophrenics experience (SpiritIndia, Sept 6, 2007). What is music therapy? It's sometimes an antidote to physical pain and psychological disorders.
Music therapy can reduce pain, anxiety and depression. It can help people learn to walk and talk again.
Where Music Therapy Happens
Group music therapy sessions can take place at schools, hospitals, hospices, nursing homes or group homes. Individual music therapy sessions can occur at the music therapist’s office, individual’s home, or even a prison cell.
Music therapy can be effective anywhere.
Music Therapy and Stroke Victims
After a stroke, people often walk unevenly because one side of the body is impaired more than the other. In other words, one leg is holding up the body. To walk normally again, you want to even it out – and this is how music therapy helps. The steady pulse or rhythmic beat of a drum offers something steady to walk in time with. Music also speeds people up; stroke victims often walk slowly with stroke, which decreases feelings of balance and stability.
To help stroke victims get their speech back, they practice to the beat of music in music therapy. There’s much less fatigue this way because the body does it automatically, can get out of rehab and recover faster. People who don’t respond to rehab could respond to music therapy.
Why Music Therapy Works
The human connection and interpersonal interaction creates relationships and reduces feelings of isolation. Connecting through music can help with osteoarthritis, disc problems, and rheumatoid arthritis. Since "more anxiety causes more pain", the relaxing effects of music lessens the need for sedatives in surgery and lower cardiovascular stress. Clements-Cortes finds that most people are skeptical of music therapy. They don't believe music helps until they try it…and then they're hooked.
What is music therapy? An method of holistic healing that's effective on many levels: mind, body, and soul.
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