Audio therapy should be considered by hospitals: Dr. Santhanam Suresh.
AB Wire
WASHINGTON, DC: An Indian American physician at Northwestern University, Dr. Santhanam Suresh, the Arthur C. King Professor in Anesthesiology, has concluded that listening to music for 30 minutes helps alleviate pain for pediatric patients.
The children, ages nine to 14, chose from a playlist of top music in different genres including pop, country, rock and classical, including popular artists like rihanna and Taylor Swift, according to a press release by Northwestern, from January of this year. Short audio books were another option in the study.
“Audio therapy is an exciting opportunity and should be considered by hospitals as an important strategy to minimize pain in children undergoing major surgery,” said Suresh, a a who is also chair of pediatric anesthesiology at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. “This is inexpensive and doesn’t have any side effects.”
Suresh conducted the study with his daughter, Sunitha Suresh, who designed it when she was a biomedical engineering student at Northwestern’s McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Science. She now is a fourth-year medical student at Johns Hopkins Medical School.
The paper was published in Pediatric Surgery International January 3, 2015.
This is believed to be the first randomized study to evaluate and demonstrate the use of patient-preferred audio therapy as a promising strategy to control post-surgical pain in children. Prior studies looked at the effectiveness of music for pain during short medical procedures. Those studies also did not use objective measures of pain nor did they show whether the perception of pain was affected by the music itself or if an alternate audio therapy would be equally as effective.
“One of the most rewarding aspects of the study was the ability for patients to continue their own audio therapy,” said Sunitha Suresh, the first author on the study. “After the study, several patients ended up bringing in their iPods and listening to their own music. They hadn’t thought of it before.”
The equal effectiveness of the audiobooks was an unexpected finding, Sunitha Suresh noted. “Some parents commented that their young kids listening to audio books would calm down and fall asleep,” she said. “It was a soothing and distracting voice.”
Read the Northwestern release in full:
http://www.feinberg.