The Effects of Music Therapy in Healthcare

The Effects of Music Therapy

Music therapy is a popular growing field of health care that uses music to heal physical, emotional, cognitive and even social needs of individuals. Music is used to provide the treatment in order to strengthen patient’s abilities and transfer them to other areas of their lives. The effectiveness of music therapy has been a constant argument, but with time the therapeutic technique has been found to be as effective as traditional forms of therapy. Given the psychological and physical evidence of the effects of music therapy, the interaction between the therapist and patients of all ages has proven to have long-lasting benefits.
As the profession of music therapy has been welcomed into health care today, the profession is placed alongside other medical services, facing the same demands of requiring verified and reliable outcomes to it’s effectiveness of a music therapy encounter. The RTC (Randomized Controlled Trial) is described as the “gold standard for medical research” (Edwards, 2004). The RTC has gradually become the acceptable method for research in all other health care services. With this being said, the concept of music therapy has been problematic given that the RTC cannot effectively be applied to the therapeutic technique, because there is no set of repeated trials with music to measure the phenomenon of music stimuli, and there is no scientific, experimental approach. The humanities, which is where music therapy is theoretically tied, often argues that “the humanities study human expressions and actions, implicitly accepting the notion that human beings are free to choose to do various things and they will, at times, freely produce exceptional and creative expressions. The sciences, on the...

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...thout this prominent, expressive and encouraging setting patients are placed in, the music preformed and interacted with may not have the same affect as it does on these individuals, no matter the age. It’s that sense of joy encompassed through the sound waves of music taught to these individuals that portray the everlasting effects of music therapy.
Regardless of individuals incapability’s, music therapy has created a light at the end of a tunnel of hope for those not able. Music enriches the lives of those who struggle on a daily basis. With allotted time and effort, the health profession of music therapy will continue to grow and become more relevant in society, offering more help to those with disabilities or mental disorders. The growth of music therapy and associated techniques can become one of the most profound and beneficial forms of therapy for our youth.