Music Therapy and Brain disorders

You know the feeling when you get excited when your favorite song comes on? According to researchers from Mcgill University in Montreal, that feeling is the dopamine in your brain released while you listen to music. Music can distract your mind from specific amounts of pain because of that dopamine being released. This can especially be useful with patients suffering from brain disorders, which is a result of your brain being damaged. Brain disorders can also affect your brain's ability to communicate with the rest of your body. This can result in the inability to speak, think, remember certain things, and more. Some of the most common brain disorders are Alzheimer's, Dementia, Parkinson's, and stroke attacks. Many of these disorders have a long recovery time, or unfortunately, there is no cure. People that suffer from brain disorders usually have to endure months or years of therapy to try to return to their original state. Music should be added to the psychical and emotional treatment those patients receive because it can potentially help their disease or illness regress. According to a study conducted by John Hopkins, a group of patients with Parkinson's disease participated in group singing. Over time, they found that those patients improved their quality of life, meaning they were more positive about their situation and had a more positive outlook on life. They also showed improvement in their cognitive abilities and voice strength. With a lot of brain disorders, patients may lose their ability to speak clearly or talk. With music therapy, though some patients have lost their ability to speak, some can sing.

Bronwyn Jones is a speech pathologist that has worked with the Stroke a Chord choir since 2010 outside Melbourne, Australia. The Stroke a Chord choir, is a choir of stroke survivors who have had a stroke on the left side of the brain. Bronwyn explains how these stroke survivors can sing, saying, "The choir can sing because they have music processed in the right side of the brain, or in a bit more diffuse areas of the brain, so singing is left relatively untouched in a left hemisphere stroke."There are many different survivors in the choir. Some can speak relatively well, and others that can not speak at all. Though their ability to speak ranges, they can all sing in the choir. The use of music to rehabilitate patients can be beneficial, especially when all medical avenues are exhausted. There is no harm in music therapy; there are no adverse effects of using music as therapy in addition to what the doctors have told them to do. But there are many positive effects of using music therapy for brain disorders

#musictherapy #braindisorders