00:00Hold the pain meds. Don't be surprised if your recovery nurse grabs a ukulele instead of a
00:12Tylenol. For the last 16 years that I played music, I probably played for about 2,000 patients
00:19already. I've been counting like on my finger how many weeks and how many patients a week,
00:25about 2,000 patients and that's a lot. Rod Selesai is a nurse in the recovery unit at
00:31University of California San Diego Health. While following medical protocol with medication dosages,
00:36he is also known to honor a musical request or two. I always find that music and pain medication
00:44works side by side to achieve a really good level of comfort. Once they got some pain medication,
00:54they started to relax and then when you instill some music in between, then exactly it's a
01:01different level of comfort that they experience. One recent study shows that music not only affects
01:09pain tolerance, the genre of music may also play a significant role. However, as researchers dug
01:15further, they found the genre is more about personal preference. If a patient is calmed by
01:19classic rock, then classic rock is the genre that helps with pain. With all music proven to be
01:24positive, what's important is that the patient enjoys it. Patient Richard Huang welcomed the music
01:29therapy. I was expecting a typical nurse that just comes in and do his or her job. And that's it. And
01:39Rod came in here with a whole different attitude and atmosphere. It kind of stunned me a little bit,
01:48but it actually helped me not think about the pain, but more focus on how to recover. Studies show when
01:58patients choose the music and listen intently, acute pain begins to dull. Acute pain is felt when pain
02:04receptors in a certain part of the body send signals to the brain.
02:08When you play music and they start to tap their hands, maybe move their foot to the beat, and then they
02:17kind of adjust their position into the pillow, you know that it's working because they're kind of trying to find a
02:24position where they could feel more comfortable and let the music sinks in. And that for me,
02:33including the changes that you see on the monitor about the patient's heart rate and blood pressure,
02:40and the fact that okay, their breathing is also slowing down, actually those are the physiological signs
02:48that tells me that this type of therapy is working. The exact reasoning between the correlation is
02:54still unknown. Some researchers say it may be due to familiar songs activating more memories and emotions.
03:01For Straight Arrow News, I'm Jack Henry.
03:02For Straight Arrow News, I'm Jack Henry.
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