I am sure we know how music is medicine to the soul, but have we heard how music helps us physically?
Studies have shown that music helps relieve chronic pain overall by releasing relaxing hormones known as endorphins through our brain and sending messages to our nerve cells. The underlying mechanisms behind this concept are still unclear, but results have shown tremendous benefits (UK Health Care 2022). A recent study suggests and hypothesizes that music is beneficial for pain relief in patients who undergo a procedure called transrectal ultrasonography (TRUS), which is a way of creating an image of the prostate gland (an organ in men to help produce seminal fluid, hormone production, and regulate urine flow) using sound waves (Howlin, Stapleton, Rooney 2022). Researchers at Yonsei University College of Medicine in Seoul conducted this study, and these findings are important because music is a universal language. Thus, readers will learn and now know whether music can be used as a form of therapy both mentally and physically.
The study was published in 2021 by a publishing company known as Prostate International and the research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors. From March to June 2019, the study was conducted by Dongu Lee, Kyo C. Koo, Byung H. Chung, and Kwang S. Lee, who are researchers in the Department of Urology at Yonsei University College of Medicine in Seoul, Republic of Korea. The research shows how music may be a method of pain relief during urologic procedures, specifically for TRUS, for patients who have benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH) and lower urinary tract symptoms (LUTS), which are diseases related to the urinary system in older men. This study was conducted because factors such as age, anal tension, physical position, anxiety, and ultrasound probe-related pain are factors that affect pain during TRUS, and there are no studies that have proven to relieve these factors for pain. According to the researchers, they said previous research indicated that listening to music activates many cortical and subcortical areas relating to pain modulation. Earlier studies have also shown that music alters brain activity when a painful stimulus is present. Some of these studies include the effectiveness of music in relieving pain during the outpatient urological procedure called TRUS biopsy, shock wave lithotripsy, urodynamic studies, percutaneous nephrostomy tube replacement, and cystoscopy. However, no study has previously examined the effect of music on decreasing pain during TRUS. As a result of this current gap in knowledge, the researchers conducted this study to figure out the effects of music during TRUS (Lee, Koo, Chung, Lee 2021).
The study included a total of 312 male patients. During the study, the researchers played popular classical music in the background for 177 patients during their TRUS procedure, and they played no music in the background for 135 patients. The researchers then reported the pain scores of 312 patients who went through TRUS with or without music and measured the pain using the visual analog scale (VAS). The VAS is a scale from 0-10, with 0 meaning no pain and 10 meaning unbearable pain. Other information was also collected other than VAS, like age, history of previous TRUS, the status of urinary symptoms, prostate volume, and prostate-specific antigen (PSA) level. Once the study was completed and the researchers analyzed the results, they found that during TRUS, the pain was associated with age. The music greatly relieved pain in patients sixty-five years or older, but not that much in patients younger than sixty-five. As a result, the researchers stated that future studies need to be conducted to discover other factors that could relieve pain in patients of this age (Lee, Koo, Chung, Lee 2021).
The audience may find this specific study important so that they know what genre of music has so far been proven to help with pain relief, which is classical music. The larger implications are that if a reader’s loved one is sixty-five years or older and must undergo TRUS, the doctors could play classical music in the background to assist with the pain during the procedure. This study also matters because it can benefit many people around the world who undergo urological issues and inspire other studies to be conducted to see if music can aid with pain caused by other medical procedures. However, the most important reason is the possibility that music in general can help relieve pain in people who have medical problems or not (Lee, Koo, Chung, Lee 2021).
Overall, the study is ethical, but there are many flaws and limitations to this study that the researchers state. First of all, the retrospective design and small sample size affected the statistical power. However, it suggested with sufficient statistical power that TRUS in patients of older age should be performed in the presence of music for reducing pain (Lee, Koo, Chung, Lee 2021). Additionally, only classical music was played, so the study was inconclusive about which genre of music is optimal for pain relief. So, to improve the study in the future, more music genres should be used to see which type of music works best for pain relief. Third, because of the limitations, patient data collection was not accomplished. If more studies occurred in the future, more variables could be incorporated like after-procedure analgesic intake and emotional distress from pain. Fourth, the study proves that pain-relieving worked for patients sixty-five and older, but the specific scientific mechanism has not been discovered and must be done with more psychological and neurologic analyses. Lastly, hemorrhoids are a vital factor in discomfort caused by TRUS, but the evaluation of hemorrhoids was not conducted by experts. Even though there were a few limitations, the study is still valid because it proves that music helps with pain relief since there was a control and experimental group (Lee, Koo, Chung, Lee 2021).
To summarize, researchers should conduct studies in the future that take in some of the limitations mentioned above, such as expanding the genre of music for patients, which could be beneficial in learning if another genre of music has a more helpful impact than classical. Additionally, many benefits come out of the information from this study for readers, such as how readers may have older family members who are experiencing health issues and can suggest using music as therapy to help relieve the pain of their loved ones. But most importantly, with this newfound knowledge, readers will now know and use music as a form of medicine to help themselves physically, but also as we all know, medicine for our souls.
References
Lee D., Koo K., Chung B., Lee K. 2021. Pain relieving effect of music on patients during transrectal ultrasonography: Prostate International. 9(4):181-184. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8740156/.
Howlin C, Stapleton A, Rooney B. 2022. Tune out pain: Agency and active engagement predict decreases in pain intensity after music listening. PLoS ONE 17(8): e0271329. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0271329.
UK Health Care. 2022. Music Therapists Help Patients Find Comfort and Relief from Pain. UK Health Care. https://ukhealthcare.uky.edu/wellness-community/blog/uk-healthcare-expert-discusses-what-you-should-know-about-music-therapy.
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