Music Heals: City of Hope Hospital patient Bettie Lee of Mission Viejo tries her hand at playing the harp during a Hands on Harps workshop Tuesday in Duarte.

Patient Diana Barocio listens to instruction during the workshop.

Healing Power of Music
Local harp player visits patients

By Else Kleeman / Staff Writer

Duarte - a few times a month, Pasadena resident Lisa Lynne packs her van full of harps and drives to the City of Hope.

There, a group of patients, their family and friends gather in the hospital lobby while she or another harpist plays. Then Lynne distributes her harps among the small crowd, teaching them simple, familiar melodies.

"To see someone with an IV pole, all their medications, chemotherapy medications going on.. to have them just engrossed in playing "Farmer in the Dell" is a wonderful thing," said Shirley Otis-Green, a nursing research specialist at City of Hope. "People would leave with a smile on their face."

Music is slowly finding a place in hospitals around the country - and not necessarily simply to ease emotional strain. A growing body of research suggests it can help relieve patients' physical suffering as well.

"What we found is than in terms of their reporting of symptoms of things like nausea, pain and anxiety, that this was very much decreased after a session with the music therapist," said Olle Sahler, an oncologist at the University of Rochester in New York who works with bone marrow transplant patients.

Preliminary research with a small number of her patients even suggested that music therapy allowed them to accept their transplants an average of two days faster - an important difference when every day is another chance to contract a life-threatening infection.

Traditional music therapy differs fro what patients experience at City of Hope - t is an intense therapy session that uses music as an aid to expression.

Therein lies one of the problems of this research field - because music can be used in so many ways, it is difficult to compare its benefits.

For some people, music is extremely effective at relieving pain. David Bradshaw, an anesthesiologist at the University of Utah administer shocks to volunteers while they focus on music, and monitors their reactions - sweating, pupil dilation and the strength of the brain signal traveling to the brain.

"If you're anxious about the signal, if your concerned about it, it. If you're involved in listening to the music, then its not possible to mount a defensive response," Bradshaw said.

"It's the process of being engaged that actually defeats the pain response."

Toward that end, he is studying how to increase what he calls "music engagement" by varying how complicated or familiar it is, and is also looking into video imagery.

"Music has a lot of benefit besides what I'm talking about, the engagement portion of it. It also modulates your mood," Bradshaw said.

Indeed, when the harps come out at City of Hope, "it's such a feel-good love feast," harpist Lynne, the hospital's resident musician, said.

As well as twice monthly night concerts, harpists also play in the hallways and at the nurses station.

"The harp is the perfect instrument, because its the perfect sound and perfect volume. We keep it simple on purpose so that it has the most calming effect," she said. "People just lighten up and brighten up."