The healing power of music
On Point with Meghna Chakrabarti
WBUR
4.3 • 3.9K Ratings
🗓️ 23 December 2022
⏱️ 48 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Many of us turn to music to feel better. But music can also help us physically heal. Studies show music can affect our blood pressure and our heart rate – and even help us manage pain.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This episode is brought to you by Slack. With Slack, you can bring all your people and |
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| 0:41.3 | This is on point. I'm Megna Chakrabardi. |
| 0:48.6 | At the first treatment, I would bring all the instruments I could carry. So I had a |
| 0:54.6 | Native American flute. I had a ukulele. I had henchimes that create a very |
| 1:13.5 | resonant sound in this very right steel glass environment in the chemotherapy unit. |
| 1:22.7 | The chemo unit is at the Center for Integrative Therapies at Boston's Dana Farber Cancer Institute. |
| 1:32.5 | The patient Suzanne Hanser was working with had metastatic breast cancer. And I would just improvise |
| 1:40.4 | on some of these instruments and say we're just going to try some music and just let me know if |
| 1:49.2 | you like it, if you want more, if we should try something else. And then I would just suggest |
| 1:55.4 | sometimes that they just breathe with the music or suggest that they just imagine being in a beautiful |
| 2:03.7 | comforting place. Suzanne is a professor of music therapy at Berkeley College of Music. The |
| 2:13.2 | women had agreed to work with her on research investigating the effects of how music changes |
| 2:18.7 | at cancer patients' psychological and physiological responses to treatment. And in the second session, |
| 2:25.4 | we would start with what they really appreciated from the first session and had the opportunity |
| 2:31.4 | to improvise with me. So I had a rain stick, something very simple to play, but when you close |
| 2:40.1 | their eyes, it often transports you to a rain forest or a waterfall. And we improvised and created |
... |
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