Music in pain treatment: society, medicine and neurosciences

Pain treatment and prevention is a common problem for the clinic and social health of all the states. The challenge is to give the patients a more short-term admission and a more complete pain relief, searching for less invasive therapies. In USA, Canada and Australia and other countries music therapy is widely being used with successful results. Nurses or special therapists of clinic staff have the particular role to distribute the music treatment inside the hospitals and in nursing homes. There is all a wide literature which demonstrates how since many years the role of nursery has been revealed for the clinical research, especially about pain relief. Music therapy uses the sound/music elements inside the user/operator relationship in a systemic operation process with preventive, rehabilitative and therapeutic aims. The physics elements of sounds strike and modify the psycho-neuro-himmuno-endocrynologic system, which diseases and illness are an alteration of body homeostatic balance. Music benefits would be effective because of the harmonic resonance or ‘entrainment’ principle, from the physic of waves and sounds. Beyond the clinic cases description, there are a lot of basic scientific studies which give information about the analgesic effects of music, utilizing physiological parameters and statistics. There are cognitive and neuroscientific proofs which demonstrate the positive effects of music: music would be a distraction element from pain, because of the inhibition of pain from the inside; music enhances the endorphin release (endogenous opioid peptides) inside the body, which act against pain; music can give the patient a pain control feeling; ‘slow’ music can relax the cardiac frequency and the rhythm of breath.