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Now available: No. 21!
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Music as one of medicine’s miracle drugs (Part 1/5)
Cultural historians and anthropologists now assume that from the earliest days of mankind, treatment of illnesses relied on the aid of music. The healers who practiced in the time of our distant ancestors and who are still to be found amongst primitive peoples, healers who are today grouped together under the term “shamans”, knew that they needed to complement the very limited ef fects of their natural, mainly herbal remedies with songs and the rhythms of drums and rattles in order to achieve the desired result with their treatments. The accompanying music was intended to calm patients down, inspire their confidence and belief in the success of the treatment and thus stimulate their powers of self-healing. Yet although at the beginning of the last century, when ethnology was still in its infancy, this was still being dismissed as charla tanry, we now know that it is in fact based on an ancient wealth of knowledge concerning the psychosomatic effects of sounds and rhythms.
Accordingly, for decades now it has been quite normal for American medics practicing on the Navajo Indians’ reservation in Arizona to “refer” their patients to the traditional healers when they cannot get any further with their own therapies. They know that the Navajo shamans, tellingly known as “singers”, can achieve surprising successes in seemingly hopeless cases with their old, often endless chanting. Nowadays, shaman techniques such as singing, drumming, hypnosis etc. also form part of the therapeutic repertoire in a number of US pain clinics, for example in Texas. People have realized that the shamans’ drumming harmonizes with the brain’s neural activities thanks to its vibrating tonal frequencies. One result of approx. 200 beats per minute is that it leads to states of consciousness that exert a positive influence on the organism and achieve adjuvant therapeutic effects. However, here too, the patient’s belief in the efficacy of the treatment, something known as “patient compliance”, is an important prerequisite to success.
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