According to Spintge, although the greatest merits of MusicMedicine are to be found in pain therapy and the stimulation of natural pain control by the body, it is also suitable for other fields of application. Finnish scientists have even successfully used music therapy on stroke patients. Hearing music for one to two hours a day promoted regeneration. Their ability to note things and to concentrate recovered more quickly. Patients with Parkinson’s dis ease displaying an imbalance between active structures and those that inhibit motor functions also benefit from music therapy. In fact, markedly rhythmic music can eliminate those impediments to movement typical of this illness. In the experience of American neurologist Oliver Sacks, music acts like a kind of “auditory dopamine”, i.e. like the kind of neurotransmitter of which a deficiency is a cause of Parkinson’s and which is nowadays dispensed in medicinal form as L-dopa. However, rhythm plays only a small role in the music used to improve the mood of patients with depression and to stimulate sufferers of dementia. Sometimes, the apathy typical of deep depressions can only be broken by music that appeals very strongly to the emotions and dissipates the apathy to such an extent that the patient feels alive again. The same is true of Alzheimer’s sufferers. Oliver Sacks discovered that music therapy is even possible in the case of dementia patients who appear to have sunk into a dull and empty apathy, “because musical perception, musical receptivity, musical emotions and musical memories can still be preserved when other forms of memory have long since been extinguished. When chosen correctly, music can serve to provide a patient with orientation and to anchor him when practically nothing else helps.” In the final analysis, all kinds of music used for therapeutic purposes – even Chinese music therapy, which relies on the cosmic contrasts of ying und yang –  have the objective, as was the case with the shamans, the Orphists and the Pythagoreans, of synchronizing, harmonizing and balancing the body and the spirit. Musical therapy may be ancient, but, for modern Western medicine, it is a new achievement whose possibilities have by no means been exhausted. For the further progress that is yet to come, we will be relying first and foremost on the future findings of brain research. And the fact that additional therapy using music is still only in its infancy is obvious from the following review by Dr. Spintge: “In the late 1970s it was impossible to work with music in a hospital. In those days, people would have laughed in your face.” What the poet Novalis wrote around 1800 had long since been forgotten, namely that, “Every illness is a musical problem. The healing, therefore, is a musical resolution.” Today, music therapy is very much part of a trend towards a holistic treatment concept about which we are reminded more and more often by the WHO. Hospitals, funding bodies, doctors, therapists, nursing staff and administrators increasingly agree that patients should be treated and looked after not “in parts”, but as a whole, i.e. as physical beings with a soul and an intellect, whose willingness to cooperate and to activate their own powers of self-healing should be promoted and made use of. Even the professional critics at Stiftung Warentest, the German product test foundation, judge music therapy to be very useful, despite their imperfect knowledge: “The therapeutic efficacy of music therapy for decreasing stress, enhancing physical performance, leading to improvements in behavioral disorders and with psychological problems such as depression and schizophrenia (short-term effects) has been adequately proven. Moreover, its use promotes interpersonal relationships in child patients with cancer, lessens the strain on patients with coronary heart disease, and lowers heart rates and blood pressure. There is no recognizable risk involved. Weighing up the risks and the benefits, the assessment is a positive one.”

Anno Bachem