Hold the presses! Here’s a new study about sleep apnea, something that affects so many people around the world! Cure for obstructive sleep apnea: didgeridoo?
The didgeridoo has been used for over 1500 years in the Kakadu region of Australia’s Northern Territory. Apparently, it is now investigated as a treatment of obstructive sleep apnea in Switzerland:
Department of Paediatric Anaesthesia and Intensive Care Unit, The Queen Silvia Children’s Hospital, Sahlgrenska University Hospital, Göteborg.
Aim: To test whether postoperative music listening reduces morphine consumption and influence pain, distress, and anxiety after day surgery and to describe the experience of postoperative music listening in school-aged children who had undergone day surgery.
Background: Music medicine has been proposed to reduce distress, anxiety, and pain. There has been no other study that evaluates effects of music medicine (MusiCure((R))) in children after minor surgery.
Methods: Numbers of participants who required analgesics, individual doses, objective pain scores (Face, Legs, Activity, Cry, Consolability [FLACC]), vital signs, and administration of anti-emetics were documented during postoperative recovery stay. Self-reported pain (Coloured Analogue Scale [CAS]), distress (Facial Affective Scale [FAS]), and anxiety (short State-Trait Anxiety Inventory [STAI]) were recorded before and after surgery. In conjunction with the completed intervention semi-structured qualitative interviews were conducted.
Results: Data were recorded from 80 children aged 7-16. Forty participants were randomized to music medicine and another 40 participants to a control group. We found evidence that children in the music group received less morphine in the postoperative care unit, 1/40 compared to 9/40 in the control group. Children’s individual FAS scores were reduced but no other significant differences between the two groups concerning FAS, CAS, FLACC, short STAI, and vital signs were shown. Children experienced the music as ‘calming and relaxing.’
Conclusions: Music medicine reduced the requirement of morphine and decreased the distress after minor surgery but did not else influence the postoperative care.
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Scientists tell us that babies cries are very intentionally hard to ignore because if a baby cries, it needs attention of one kind or another! How about a lullaby? As a mother and a professional musician, I believe that singing, humming, or playing a recording of a lullaby, especially if it is familiar, can calm, soother and comfort a baby. Of course combining that with rocking, holding or snuggling the baby will also help.
If you played these lullabies for your baby during pregnancy, baby doesn recognize this music and often calms down very quickly. To see my lullabies and either get the download immediately or order the CD, go to fussy_babies.
Since I created my headphones for surgery last year, I also decided to offer just the download of the music as well. Lately, more people are choosing to download the music to put on their own MP3 players. Obviously I think this is a wonderful idea, better than having no music or taking in music that could actually energize the body and require more anesthesia to relax the body and keep it asleep.
The ideal solution though is the surgery music headphones. This is because you can have the music delivered directly to the brain, through the 8th cranial nerve, and you can avoid all wires and cords. Any MP3 player in the world today has two wires that lead from the player to the headphones or earbuds. My headphones have NO wires or cords and deliver the music from a programmed chip in the headphone itself, powered by a lithium battery.
In the past year, NO ONE has been prevented from taking the headphones into surgery! As a matter of fact, patients report that the doctors and nurses are fascinated by the headphones and music and eager to see them work!
If you or anyone you know is having surgery, go immediately to www.surgicalheadphones.com and check these out. Thanks!
I’ve Come Full Circle!
Last night I had a once in a lifetime experience.
The dear man who has been my mentor in the field of music medicine for twenty years now, was in the hospital recovering from an emergency appendectomy, and I was able to deliver him a set of my surgery headphones to use during his recovery! If it were not for Dr. Arthur Harvey, these headphones would not exist and now, he got to benefit from them! Dr. Harvey reported that the quality of music was “amazing” and as I stood there talking with his son, Dr. Harvey was smiling and singing along with the favorite hymns I had put on just for him! Needless to say I am thrilled to be able to help the man who is responsible for my being where I am in this wonderful profession and am trusting that he will continue to recover and maybe do so faster and with less pain, thanks to the music he tadught me about long ago!
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Earlier this week I wrote an article about pregnancy and the fetal ear. So many women want to know exactly when the unborn baby begins to hear. There has been quite a bit of research and documentation and we now know definitively that by the beginning to the second trimester, the ear is beginning to funtion and baby can hear mother’s heartbeat and digestive sounds. To read the entire article and many others that I’ve written, see http://ezinearticles.com/?expert=Dr._Alice_Cash. Thanks, as always, for all your support! Please feel free to send you comments on any and all articles. Thanks.
→ No CommentsTags: anxiety·knee replacement·rave reviews of surgery headphones
