Crypto News: Songs to heal by

Hi, it's Ike in Boston. Listening to music after surgery can help patients recover, research indicates. More on that soon, but first …

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A few years ago on Christmas Eve, I joined some of my doctor friends at a local hospital and sang carols for patients. Some were extremely sick with heart disease, hooked up to a tangle of IV bags and devices, and they couldn't move or talk. But something amazing happened: After we started singing, their heart rates dropped.

I wondered — might our harmonies of "Silent Night" have healing power?

"Your story is great, but if I can show that it's true, your story is going to be super," says Eldo Frezza, a surgery professor at California Northstate University's medical school. And he's already begun digging into the data.

Music helped people recover from surgery, according to an early analysis from Frezza and his students that was presented Monday at the American College of Surgeons conference in San Francisco. After looking at dozens of papers they found that some patients who listened to music after procedures had less pain or anxiety, a lower heart rate and diminished use of opioid painkillers.

"We use a lot of medication, we spend a lot of money, the number of opioids — it's terrible," Frezza said. "If we can decrease expenses by just listening to music, why not?"

The research looked at 35 previously published papers that included more than 3,500 patients, Frezza said. It was presented as an abstract, and the team is working on a full paper.

The study didn't look specifically at the physiological mechanisms that might explain why music helps, but Frezza had ideas. Some of the papers reviewed showed that listening to music was linked to reduced levels of cortisol, a stress hormone.

Frezza is interested in doing more research in the area, and he's hoping to garner interest from different medical systems to do a larger analysis. That could allow him to measure hormone levels and maybe even test different types of music to see which might be more helpful.

But, he said, the question of musical preference would be difficult to study, since it's so subjective, he said. "People who like country, they don't like pop," Frezza said. "People who like pop, they don't like rock. How can we say one music is better than another?" — Ike Swetlitz

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