Bizarre way music can boost your health

Got an upcoming surgery? It turns out your favourite playlist may just be able to help. Find out how.

Listening to music after surgery may boost recovery.

Listening to music after surgery can boost patients’ recovery and half their use of strong painkillers, surprising new research has found.

The benefits were seen across several measures – opioid use, heart rate, anxiety and reported pain – and could offer a simple, cheap and low-risk method to boost patients’ health.

The data, presented at the American College of Surgeons’ this weekend, was based on analysis of patient data from 37 different studies and not tied to a particular genre or type of music.

The team found opioid use more than doubled without music, with patients who did not listen to songs post-surgery using twice as much morphine compared to those who did.

The California Northstate University researchers also found patients who heard music – whether over speakers or headphones – reported 19 per cent lower pain scores, while anxiety levels dropped slightly too.

The researchers said keeping the heart rate in a healthy range – allowing “effective circulation of oxygen and nutrients throughout the body” – was also vital to recovery, and music lowered patients heart-rate by about 4.5 beats per minute.

California Northstate Professor Eldo Frezza said a drop in cortisol – which is tied to stress levels – may play a role in improving recovery.

“When patients wake up after surgery, sometimes they feel really scared and don’t know where they are,” he said.

“Music can help ease the transition from the waking up stage to a return to normalcy and may help reduce stress around that transition.”

Prof Frezza said, if patients were up to it, he recommended listening to your favourite music after surgery.

“We’re not trying to say that one type of music is better than another,” he said.

“We think music can help people in different ways after surgery because music can be comforting and make you feel like you’re in a familiar place.”

Originally published as Bizarre way music can boost your health