Feb. 5--Laughter might be the best medicine, but music plays an increasingly vital role in mental and physical well-being.
The power of music is often self-evident: it can pump us up for a big sporting event; help elicit feelings feelings of patriotism during a parade; assist teens in getting through a first case of puppy love gone bad; and turn usually respectable people into whirling dervishes on the dance floor. It also provides the soundtrack to our lives. Certain songs will pinpoint an exact time and place from the past.
It's that kind of power that's also allowed music to be a successful tool for everything from cancer to Alzheimer's disease to mental and physical rehabilitation.
"It's incredible. It makes people feel strong and hopeful," says Amy Zabin, a music therapist with 25 years experience who sees patients at Stamford and Greenwich hospitals. "Most of us listen to give us pleasure. It's a way of releasing endorphins, lowering blood pressure and mentally and physically feeling better. Music expresses what words can't. e Music has an ability to reach areas we don't fully understand. People who have had a stroke can't speak but can sing, Alzheimer's patients might not be able to remember yesterday but can recall lyrics from songs during their courtship years. Music is reaching parts of the brain we are just now beginning to understand."
Zabin recalls a 16-year-old drummer who had been in a car accident. Doctors doubted he had any brain function left. She brought in two sticks and two drum pads, then played a basic rhythm on one of the pads. The patient followed. The two continued the process until they were hammering out fairly complex patterns. "Having played drums, there's a feeling a drumstick has in your hand," Zabin says. "Everyone cheered. He said that's what inspired him to come back and join everyone, the pleasure and intrinsic beauty of music."
But one need not have a background in singing or instrumental prowess to benefit from music's therapeutic benefits.
"Music is such an integral part of people's lives that they don't think about it, don't really appreciate it," says Fran Becker, a social worker who coordinates the integrative medicine program at the Bennett Cancer Center at Stamford Hospital. "During times of crisis, that's when they come to an understanding of what music can do for them: help them stay in the present, give them a sense of hope."
Zabin remembers a cancer patient who was a Vietnam War veteran. He was, Zabin says, the type "who preferred bourbon and aspirin over chemotherapy and would prefer to swat at a nurse when she walked by as opposed to say how he actually felt."
As Zabin began to sing songs he loved as a teen -- macho numbers like "King of the Road" by Roger Miller -- the patient began "to cry and shake and have flashbacks from the war and began to speak about the feelings he had worked for decades to hold down."
Toward the end of that session, the patient's adult grandson entered the room, shocked to see his grandfather exhibiting such emotion. "The bond that began to link between the two of them was almost indescribable," Zabin says.
In her work at Stamford and Greenwich hospitals, Zabin has devised a program that helps cancer patients from the point of diagnosis onward. Initially, she says, music can help a patient discuss hopes and fears. She may ask a married patient about a wedding song to form a bond of strength between patient and spouse. When treatment begins in the form of radiation or chemotherapy, she sings and plays music with the patients.
"It helps reduce the feeling of isolation," Zabin says. "It takes them out of the chemo lab and into another environment and makes them think about their wellness rather than their illness."
Throughout the treatment and recovery sessions, she uses flute music for meditation and breathing technique sessions. When someone has reached the end of life, Zabin uses songs to help the dying say goodbye to loved ones. Hearing is the last sense to go in a dying person, Zabin says.
In one instance, an elderly man dying of cancer hadn't moved much for a few days. His family told Zabin he enjoyed classical music. When she began to play Dvorak's "Going Home" from the composer's New World Symphony, the patient sat up and stated that he could now die in beauty, Zabin says.
"Because we think of cancer as a traumatic time for people, people hold trauma in their bodies and preverbal part of the brain," Becker says.
"To really access emotion where they hold it in their bodies, you need methods other than talk to access it and let it go. They can't put words to it because they can't access it. With music, people can tap into that feeling and name the emotion and begin to talk about it."
Zabin found her calling growing up in England, where her pianist mother would help people with mental retardation learn social skills. Years later, she worked as a researcher for noted neurologist Oliver Sachs. Aside from her voice, she employs a variety of instruments from guitar and flute to crystal singing bowls.
"What I've noticed is that almost everybody has used music before in their lives," she says. "Some people are able to really deepen it. This is the music that I need to feel strong. Those who used it a lot are looking for guided imagery from it."
Jerome Sehulster, a professor of psychology at University of Connecticut Stamford and opera aficionado who writes on the subject for The Advocate and Greenwich Time, has been thinking about music's role in the lives of those who are less passionate about music than he is since recently reading "This is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession" by Daniel J. Levitan.
"For me, music is a very powerful stimulus and I think individuals differ, maybe because of exposure, maybe because of genetics. Those that are deeply affected by it, can't imagine a world without it," he says.
He says those who treat music as something more than diversion know which music to play to fit a mood, just as they know what to avoid when they are down in the dumps or what music may dampen a sense of festivity or celebration. He cites Mahler's 9th Symphony, a piece he admittedly likes but hasn't listened to in 20 years because of its deep and dark state.
"I've had experiences where the music that was on -- the color of it -- just perfectly matched the experience we were having," Sehulster says. "To me that soundtracks a larger experience. My wife will say, 'It's a Mozart kind of day' and she's exactly right for reasons I can't explain."
Sehulster also believes the more time a person spends trying to understand music, the greater the reward.
"You can hear something differently until you've cracked it. It just sounds like noise," Sehulster says. "Once you've cracked, the emotions, drama and inner-anguish hits you. To make that handshake, you need to not just have it on in the background. There's a difference between active and passive listening. It can be no different from having the TV or talk radio in the background. Creating that handshake between yourself and jazz or classical that requires real active listening."
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