Music Therapy for Pain Management Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 2250 words

Music Therapy for Pain Management - Essay Example While practitioners report good results with it, most of the practice is based on empiric evidence. Therefore, it would be worthwhile to explore research to find out evidence that can support current practice or can change practice. To determine evidence, a literature search was undertaken on the available database with the key words "music", "therapy", "music therapy", "nursing practice", "pain management", "complementary therapy", "alternative therapy", and "palliative nursing." This resulted into 234 articles. These articles were further searched on key words "research articles." This narrowed down the number of articles to 34. Among these articles, a search was conducted with the key word "national guideline," and this revealed 0 articles. This indicated there exists no nursing practice guidelines on pain management with music therapy. Further search was conducted with the phrase "systemic review", and this resulted into 6 articles. One of these articles was chosen, and another 5 articles were chosen from the previous group. The inference from this search was that music therapy is practiced in contemporary palliative care nursing practice, but there is no national guideline for its use. However, the existence of many systemic reviews tells us about the evidence that can be used in practice. Article that Best Supports Nursing Interventions The article that best supports nursing interventions is "Music as an Intervention in Hospitals" by Evans (2001) on behalf of The Joanna Briggs Institute for Evidenced based Nursing and Midwifery. This is a systemic review of articles graded on the basis of level of evidence. The author sites evidence from literature that music has been used for all age groups in a wide variety of clinical care settings as adjuncts to conventional management. The care settings include intensive care, coronary care units, and even outpatient departments. From the evidence, it appears that it has been used universally across practice settings. In some cases, it has also been used a relaxation technique. The author presents findings from different articles and studies. Evidence suggests that music in the form of recorded music from a compact disc player was the therapeutic music of choice. The randomized controlled trials indicate that music has been used for reduction of anxiety, relaxation, reduction o f pain, improvement of cognitive function, buffering noise, increasing satisfaction, improvement of mood, increment of exercise tolerance, and improvement of tolerance of some procedures. Music has also been used to alleviate symptoms of anxiety and pain. The outcome measures for pain control were decrease in the severity of pain and decreased requirement of analgesics. For procedures, the decreased requirement of sedatives was evidenced by improvement in patient satisfaction, better tolerance of procedure, and notable elevation of mood. The researchers recorded symptomatic reduction of anxiety and corroborated these through physical examination, which indicated reduction in heart rate and respiratory rate. No subjective reduction of pain symptoms was noted, although the dose of analgesics required to produce a desired pain relief was less. Similarly, reduction of required dose of sedatives during unpleasant procedures was noted. This review did not find any evidence that music impr oved tolerance of the procedures, but it improved mood of the