Going through a surgical procedure, even when it's a fairly benign and non-invasive one, can be a traumatic experience for the patient, from emergency procedures such as appendix removal to even cancer-related ones - but a new study shows that surgery pain and the anxiety that comes along with this experience could be relieved in the most pleasant way possible.
Over he past few months, there have been a few videos that have gone viral where a patient will sing in the middle of their own surgical procedure, and it seems there's a reason other than eccentricity to go through that kind of ordeal: music can actually help with surgery pain.
According to The Daily Star, English researchers have found that surgery pain can actually lower when patients listen to music before, after and even during their procedures, not only feeling physically better but also going through less anxiety about the entire process.
Business-Standard reports that, for the surgery pain study, the research team went through 72 trials of around 7,000 patients, finding that, after listening to music, patients were far less anxious and felt considerably better following their surgery.
In all, it wasn't only those patients' moods and tranquility that improved, but even how much pain they were enduring: those patients who had been exposed to music ended up needing considerably less pain medication and reported less pain than those in the control group.
According to NPR, this is hardly a new practice: at the times of iconic nurse Florence Nightingale, in the first decades of the 20th century, music was already used to relax patients and ease their surgery pain.
The surgery pain study about music came from researchers from the Queen Mary University of London and the Brunel University, in an article published in the Lancet under the title "Music as an aid for postoperative recovery in adults: a systematic review and meta-analysis."