Listening to music after surgery seems to be an effective painkiller

Listening to music after surgery seems to ease a patient’s pain and anxiety, which could be a cheap and easy way to reduce painkiller use.

“A lot of people, when they are awakening from anaesthesia, are lost,” says Eldo Frezza at California Northstate University College of Medicine. “They have anxiety or maybe they feel pain of the surgery.”

Research has repeatedly shown that music can be calming, which prompted Frezza and his colleagues to investigate if it may help after an operation.

The team analysed the results of 35 studies that explored how listening to it immediately after surgery affected people’s pain, anxiety, heart rate and painkiller use.

Each study involved about 100 people, half of whom were asked to listen to music, of different genres, after abdominal or bone-related surgery. The studies varied in how long the participants did this, ranging from half an hour to until they were discharged.

The remaining participants – who were matched to the former group for age, sex and surgery type – didn’t listen to music after their procedures.

Frezza’s team – which presented the results at the American College of Surgeons congress in San Francisco, California – found that music seemed to reduce pain levels by about 20 per cent, on average, according to self-reports using a scale running from 20 to 80. Those who listened to music also required less than half as much morphine while in hospital as those who did not.

The team also found that listening to music seems to reduce anxiety. It lowered heart rates by around 4.5 beats per minute, on average, and reduced self-reported anxiety levels by about 2.5 points, also on a scale of 20 to 80.

“A 2.5-point reduction is pretty small, but it’s moving in the direction we want it to go,” says Annie Heiderscheit at Anglia Ruskin University in Cambridge, UK.

Music shifts our focus away from pain by boosting levels of a signalling molecule called serotonin that passes between brain cells and makes us feel good, she says, and can also distract us from anxious thoughts. This could be a cheap and easy way for hospitals to help patients recover after surgery, says Heiderscheit.

Future research should include large studies where people who are having the same sort of surgery at around the same time are randomly allocated to listen to music after the procedure or not, says Frezza. This would give a more reliable result than combining the results of previous small studies, he says.