Music as Medicine

Now, I know I’m known for explaining how not to do certain things  (just look at my books, How Not to Die, and the one I’m working on right now–How Not to Diet), but what I actually have to share with you is quite positive and boils down to this: What’s the best way to live a healthy life?  Here, are some answers.

“If music be the food of love – play on,” as Shakespeare said.  Today, we’re going to explore the sound that soothes the savage beast and makes us feel better in the bargain.   Music can do so much.  It can sometimes beat out anti-anxiety drugs, it can reduce allergic reactions, and listening to your favorite tunes can significantly affect your testosterone levels.  Here’s the story. 

We’ve been playing music since back during the Paleolithic era, 40,000 years ago, with music as therapy documented at least since Biblical times. The first such experiment was published in the Journal of the American Medical Association in 1914. Phonograph in operating room “as a means of calming and distracting patients from the horror of the situation” as they lie awake during surgery.

Now that we have anesthesia, music is used to calm nerves before surgery. Normally we use Valium-type drugs like midazolam, sold as Versed, but it can have a variety of side effects–including sometimes making people even more agitated. So, this study was performed to see if relaxing music has a greater anxiety-reducing effect than a standard dose of the drug.  So, they whipped out some Kenny G., and the music worked significantly better than the drug:  lower anxiety scores, lower heart rate, lower blood pressure. Perhaps the first report of any anti-anxiety therapy working not just as good as, but better than benzodiazepine drugs. And the difference in the side effects of relaxing music compared to the drug is obvious–there were none. Soft jazz causes no post-operative hangover.  So, the researchers suggest we should start using music instead of midazolam.

Music may be effective in reducing anxiety and pain in children as well— undergoing minor medical and dental procedures, helping with blood draws, getting their shots — even reducing the pain of spinal taps, though evidently Mozart is powerless against the pain of circumcision.

But it doesn’t take a randomized controlled trial to demonstrate that listening to music can be relaxing. Tell me something I don’t know. Okay, this I did not know. If you take someone with a latex allergy and inject their skin with latex, they get a big, red, angry bump. But, if you repeat the test after they’ve been listening to Mozart for 30 minutes, they develop a much smaller bump. They had less of an allergic reaction. And if you think that’s wild, Beethoven didn’t work; same reaction kind of before and after and so it wasn’t just the music. Schubert, didn’t work either, nor did Haydn, or Brahms; both failed to reduce the allergic skin responses. Thus, the reducing effect on the allergic responses may be specific to Mozart. So, Mozart’s looking pretty good—but wait a second, maybe Mozart suppresses the immune system in general?  That wouldn’t be good, so they also injected a chemical that causes reactions in everyone, not just allergic people, and Mozart had no effect.  So, it seems to just suppress the pathological allergic reaction, and if that isn’t crazy enough for you, they drew people’s blood after the music and stuck their white blood cells in a Petri dish with a little latex and measured the allergic antibody response. The white blood cells from the person exposed to Mozart had less of an allergic response, even outside the body, compared to cells taken from Beethoven blood. That is cool!

Music may even impact our metabolism. It all started with this study: They found that the resting energy expenditure—the resting metabolic rate, the amount of calories burned just lying around—was lower in preemies when they piped in Mozart, which may explain why infants exposed to music put on weight faster, so much so they were able to go home earlier. Now, gaining weight faster is great for premature babies, but not necessarily for adults. Could listening to music slow our metabolism and contribute to weight gain? No, this study found no effect on adults. But, they used Bach, not Mozart, and Bach doesn’t work for babies either. A drop in energy expenditure on Mozart, but not on Bach. This would suggest that it may be more of a “Mozart-specific effect” than a universal “music effect.”

What if you just listen to music of your choice—does it affect our metabolism or not? We didn’t know, until now. And it turns out that listening to music appears to actually increase our metabolic rate, such that we burn an average of 27.6 more calories a day even just lying in bed, though that’s only about six M&Ms worth. Better to use music to get up and start dancing or exercising. Music can not only improve exercise enjoyment, but performance as well – a way to improve athletic performance that’s legal!

Male bodybuilders may be less enthused by this effect, though. After listening to music for just 30 minutes, testosterone levels drop 14% in young men and go up 21% in young women. All kinds of music or just some types of music? Thirty minutes of silence had no effect, same testosterone levels before and after. But a half hour of Mozart suppressed testosterone, as did jazz, as did pop music, as did Gregorian chants (no relation). What about a half hour of people’s personal favorites? Testosterone levels cut in half. Testosterone decreased in males under all music conditions, whereas testosterone increased in the females. What is going on? Well, in men, testosterone is related to libido, dominance, aggressiveness, whereas women get a bigger boost in testosterone from cuddling than from sex and so, maybe we evolved using music as a way to ensure we all got along–like a melodious cold shower to keep everyone kind of chilled out.

What physiologic effects does classical music have compared to new age music, grunge rock, techno, and heavy metal? Here are some answers.

The stress-reducing effects of music appear to extend throughout the clinical spectrum even to the critically ill, intubated in an intensive care unit. Those with headphones on their head playing Mozart cut stress hormones, like adrenaline, in half compared to those with headphones playing nothing, resulting in a lower mean arterial blood pressure. But, are all types of music just as relaxing? Researchers compared the effects of Mozart, versus Pearl Jam, versus Enya on normal healthy subjects. What do you think they found?

After listening to Mozart for 15 minutes, people reported a significant reduction in tension. With new age music, they also got a reduction in tension, more relaxation, less hostility, but reports of a significant reduction in mental clarity and vigor. And, after grunge rock, people said they felt more hostile, tired, sad, and tense, with reductions in caring, relaxation, clarity, and vigor. But these were just subjective measures—asking people how they felt. What about objective measures? Well, we do have data on techno. After 30 minutes of classical music, the stress hormone cortisol significantly dropped. But if instead of listening to Beethoven’s Symphony No. 6, Opera 68, they listened to Cyber Trip’s Techno Shock Techno Magnetiko, stress hormone levels went up. Now, endorphin levels went up too, which, you may think, “Oh that’s nice”—until you realize that endorphins are our body’s natural painkillers, and go up after a variety of aversive stimuli, like getting burned or prodded.  This may just be a function of the tempo, though. People get the same bump in breathing and blood pressure listening to fast classical music, Vivaldi’s Presto—as stimulating or even more so than the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

What about heavy metal music? Participants were randomly assigned to self-selected, classical, heavy metal, or silence. Listening to self-selected and classical music produced increased feelings of relaxation, as well as sitting in silence, but not so much for the heavy metal condition. Compared to relaxing and pleasant Renaissance music, exposure to arousing and unpleasant heavy metal caused a heightened amylase response in men. Amylase is an enzyme in our saliva that digests starch, and so when we go into fight or flight mode, we can immediately start churning out the enzyme to provide sugars for quick energy. So, you get a spike when you go skydiving, or if someone dunks you in near-freezing water, or, if you make a guy listen to heavy metal for ten minutes. With all that extra enzyme, if he’s eating bread while banging his head, he could end up digesting it better.

Metal is more likely to cause the medical community indigestion, though. Although the American Medical Association’s Group on Science and Technology admits there’s no evidence that this music has any deleterious effect on the behavior of adolescents, that doesn’t stop them from suggesting there’s anecdotal evidence that those who identify with such bands as Slayer and Metallica may be at risk for drug abuse or even participation in satanic activities. To which one doctor wrote in to reply, that for every teenager who commits suicide or some crime under the influence of heavy metal music, there may be dozens of white-collar criminals engaged in such activities as insider trading, fraud, and corruption. Maybe we should instead be blaming Bach or Barry Manilow.

To see any graphs, charts, graphics, images or studies mentioned here, please go to the Nutrition Facts podcast landing page.  There, you’ll find all the detailed information you need – plus links to all the sources we cite for each of these topics.

Be sure to check out my new How Not to Die Cookbook.  It’s beautifully designed, with more than 120 recipes for delicious, plant-based meals, snacks and beverages.  All the proceeds from the sales of all my books all go to charity.  I just want you to be healthier.  

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Thanks for listening to Nutrition Facts. I’m Dr. Michael Greger.

This is just an approximation of the audio content, contributed by Allyson Burnett.