More and more people are hearing about our Surgical Serenity Headphones and choosing to use them.  People remember reading about them and know  that they will use them if they are told that they need surgery.  That’s exactly what happened with a customer today and she  will be “practicing” with them over the next few weeks so that she automatically relaxes and calms down when she hears this particular music.

For people who don’t happen to live in Louisville, KY, they are readily available online!  Surgical Serenity Headphones are also being test and several key hospitals around the country and just this week I talked with two more hospitals about research and testing.  There are so many interesting studies that people people are devising for me; studies that look not only at the headphones ability to decrease the amount of pain medication, but also comparing our headphones to acupuncture, and another looking at whether people wearing our headphones and listening to our proprietary music perhaps leave the hospital sooner, thus getting back to their homes and lives sooner as well as allowing the hospital to see more patients.  Lots of good information to be gathered.

As a matter of fact, I’ve sold so many lately that my inventory is getting low so I’ll be ordering another 100 or so soon.  The price on the new ones may have to go up so if you want some, now would be an excellent time!  Surgical Serenity Headphones.

We’ve known for a long time that listening to calm, comforting, soothing music before surgery could do the same thing as the drugs that are now given…and without the risk of adverse reactions or overly and unnecessarily sedating the patient.  Today another study appeared also documenting this! 

Biol Res Nurs. 2011 Jan 28. [Epub ahead of print]

Evidence That Music Listening Reduces Preoperative Patients’ Anxiety.
Lee KC, Chao YH, Yiin JJ, Hsieh HY, Dai WJ, Chao YF.

Abstract
Background: Patients often exhibit preoperative fear and anxiety that may influence the process of induction and recovery from anesthesia. Music is thought to be an alternative to medication for relief of fear and anxiety. Objectives: The purpose of the present study was to explore the feasibility of using heart rate (HR) variability (HRV) for evaluating the efficacy of music listening to relieve the patients’ anxiety during their stay in the operation room waiting area and to compare the HRV measures with subjective Visual Analogue Scale (VAS) scores. Methods: In total, 140 patients were randomly assigned to the experimental (n = 64) or control group (n = 76). The intervention consisted of a 10-min period of exposure to relaxing music delivered through headphones. Anxiety levels were measured by VAS (a 10-point scale) and 5 min of HRV monitoring before and after the music intervention. Results: The music group demonstrated significant reductions in VAS scores, mean HR, low-frequency HRV, and low- to high-frequency ratio and an increase in high-frequency HRV, while patients in the control group showed no changes. The subjective results of patients’ VAS anxiety scores were consistent with the objective results of HRV parameters. Conclusions: Listening to music can significantly lower the anxiety levels of patients before surgery. The frequency-domain parameters of HRV can be indicators for monitoring the change in anxiety level of preoperative patients.

A new clinical study on the effects of music in the PACU (post-anesthesia care unit) has just come in from Sweden. The final result is that “These findings promote use of listening to music to establish a healing environment for patients in a postanaesthesia care unit.”

Patients’ perception of music versus ordinary sound in a postanaesthesia care unit: a randomised crossover trial.

Fredriksson AC, Hellström L, Nilsson U.

Dep. Anesthesia and Intensive Care, Malmoe University Hospital, Sweden.

Interesting history about anesthesia

There is so much in this world that we take for granted…we have to!  We can’t be experts on everything and especially when it comes to the medical world, we must trust that our doctors know what they’re talking about.  However, doctors are human, like everyone else, and they do make mistakes.  We must decide for ourselves how much information we want to get about any particular procedure or test.In line with this, I thought my readers might be interested to know a little more about the history of anesthesia.  Enjoy!The date of the first operation under anesthetic, Oct. 16, 1846, ranks among the most iconic in the history of medicine. It was the moment when Boston, and indeed the United States, first emerged as a world-class center of medical innovation. The room at the heart of Massachusetts General Hospital where the operation took place has been known ever since as the Ether Dome, and the word “anesthesia” itself was coined by the Boston physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes to denote the strange new state of suspended consciousness that the city’s physicians had witnessed. The news from Boston swept around the world, and it was recognized within weeks as a moment that had changed medicine forever.But what precisely was invented that day? Not a chemical – the mysterious substance used by William Morton, the local dentist who performed the procedure, turned out to be simply ether, a volatile solvent that had been in common use for decades. And not the idea of anesthesia – ether, and the anesthetic gas nitrous oxide, had both been thoroughly inhaled and explored. As far back as 1525, the Renaissance physician Paracelsus had recorded that it made chickens “fall asleep, but wake up again after some time without any bad effect,” and that it “extinguishes pain” for the duration.  What the great moment in the Ether Dome really marked was something less tangible but far more significant: a huge cultural shift in the idea of pain. Operating under anesthetic would transform medicine, dramatically expanding the scope of what doctors were able to accomplish. What needed to change first wasn’t the technology – that was long since established – but medicine’s readiness to use it.How does this apply to the acceptance of music during surgery?  I’ll let you draw the parallels because I think it is fairly self-evident.  Music has been used in medical settings for centuries.  Evidence of this can be found easily by simply Googling “history of music in medicine.”  Music is one of the most ancient and powerful of medical/healing interventions.  But those of us who believe this fervently must get the word out to our doctors and have proof in hand.  My blogs and my websites are filled with the facts and the documentation you need.  If you want more, just email me through the blog or through my website, www.HealingMusicEnterprises.com.
There is so much in this world that we take for granted…we have to! We can’t be experts on everything and especially when it comes to the medical world, we must trust that our doctors know what they’re talking about. However, doctors are human, like everyone else, and they do make mistakes. We must decide for ourselves how much information we want to get about any particular procedure or test.
In line with this, I thought my readers might be interested to know a little more about the history of anesthesia. Enjoy!
The date of the first operation under anesthetic, Oct. 16, 1846, ranks among the most iconic in the history of medicine. It was the moment when Boston, and indeed the United States, first emerged as a world-class center of medical innovation. The room at the heart of Massachusetts General Hospital where the operation took place has been known ever since as the Ether Dome, and the word “anesthesia” itself was coined by the Boston physician and poet Oliver Wendell Holmes to denote the strange new state of suspended consciousness that the city’s physicians had witnessed. The news from Boston swept around the world, and it was recognized within weeks as a moment that had changed medicine forever.But what precisely was invented that day? Not a chemical – the mysterious substance used by William Morton, the local dentist who performed the procedure, turned out to be simply ether, a volatile solvent that had been in common use for decades. And not the idea of anesthesia – ether, and the anesthetic gas nitrous oxide, had both been thoroughly inhaled and explored. As far back as 1525, the Renaissance physician Paracelsus had recorded that it made chickens “fall asleep, but wake up again after some time without any bad effect,” and that it “extinguishes pain” for the duration. What the great moment in the Ether Dome really marked was something less tangible but far more significant: a huge cultural shift in the idea of pain. Operating under anesthetic would transform medicine, dramatically expanding the scope of what doctors were able to accomplish. What needed to change first wasn’t the technology – that was long since established – but medicine’s readiness to use it.
How does this apply to the acceptance of music during surgery? I’ll let you draw the parallels because I think it is fairly self-evident. Music has been used in medical settings for centuries. Evidence of this can be found easily by simply Googling “history of music in medicine.” Music is one of the most ancient and powerful of medical/healing interventions. But those of us who believe this fervently must get the word out to our doctors and have proof in hand. My blogs and my websites are filled with the facts and the documentation you need. If you want more, just email me through the blog or through my website, www.HealingMusicEnterprises.com.

Plastic Surgery and criminology?

For much of his life — indeed, for all of this and much of the past century — Victor Parsonnet has stood at the center of Newark history, especially in the fields of medicine and music. As a cardiac surgeon, he has been closely involved with such pioneering developments as the pacemaker, the transplant, and the artificial heart. As a pianist and patron of the arts, he has until recently served as chair of the New Jersey Symphony Orchestra and contributed much to its attaining world-class status.   more