A new study published in The Lancet has shown the benefits of listening to music while in surgery and in recuperation. The study, which involved over 7000 patients, reported that patients who listened to music pre- or post-surgery experienced less stress and pain and even in some cases required less pain medication.
“Modern theories of pain suggest that pain experience is affected by physical and psychological factors,” the London-based researchers explained in the paper. “Cognitive activities such as listening to music can affect perceived intensity and unpleasantness of pain, enabling patients’ sensation of pain to be reduced.”
Or, in layman’s terms, music distracts you from sensations. And this is all too true – how many times have you been funking a little too intensely to The Weeknd’s Can’t Feel My Face, only to realise that the oven alarm has been sounding for a solid two minutes and your garlic bread is burnt? (No, just me?)
Of course, it also depends on taste. Fairfax’s National Music Editor Peter Vincent says that he’d prefer “a hard rock band” (in the same vein, maybe someone should point him in the direction of Okilly Dokilly, the new Ned Flanders-themed metal band hailing from Arizona). I’d probably lean towards Ke$ha and Lana del Rey’s 2010s hits Die Young and Born to Die for a good measure of morbid humour – or a classic like AC/DC’s Highway to Hell.
But whatever the track, the researchers found music so beneficial that they’ve strongly encouraged it as a tool – regardless of genre – to anyone undergoing surgery. Of course, there’d be factors that prevented all hospitals from using such a strategy – I’d highly suspect the risk of surgeons instinctively headbanging during an open heart – but we’re glad at this definitive link between music and recovery.