What Does Music Therapy Do Against Cancer Symptoms?

Cancer patients face problems with depression1, distress and fatigue2, pain3, and more. There are, however, nonpharmacological ways to address these issues, and music is one of them.

If you have cancer, music therapy can significantly improve your quality of life, while decreasing your depression4,5 and anxiety 4,5 in just one to two months, and this is compared to standard care4. It can even improve your mood5. When added to your standard care, it can help with your cancer-related fatigue, particularly in cancers that affect the blood, bone marrow, and lymph nodes when compared to standard care alone, and it didn’t matter how often you get music therapy7. If you have breast cancer, music interventions can also lower your systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood, and heart rate5.
Although one meta-analysis declared that no adverse effects were reported8, any practicing music therapist can tell you that choosing the wrong song, the wrong intervention, or a wrong combination of the two can lead to distress in the patient. For example, gynecology survivors getting chemotherapy and surgical treatments lowered their distress by just passively listening to culturally appropriate music for more the 35 minutes, three or fewer times a week for two months or more. However, they experienced higher distress, lower positive psychology, and lower quality of life when listening to new age music9. I want to note here that it wasn’t the new age music itself that caused the distress. In my opinion it was likely that the new age music wasn’t culturally appropriate for the patients, and because the music didn’t match the patients, the patients couldn’t connect with it, causing the distress.

Typically, passive listening is used even if just for 30–60 minutes for one — three sessions8 but could also be 1 to 8 sessions and 15 to 60 minutes ranging from 3 days to 15 months5. Passive listening usually refers to being sedentary while listening to songs, and active music therapy refers to physically playing or singing the songs. Even within passively listening, there’s a lot of mental interventions that can happen. Passively listening with recorded music can include verbal relaxation techniques, guided imagery, and matching moods. With active music therapy, you are making the music, including singing, improvising, and playing instruments. Not only was passive music listening used more often for people with cancer, but it was more effective for these people than active music making, and it didn’t change if the cancer patients had radiation therapy, surgery, or chemotherapy5.

Passive music interventions can also help reduce your pain4,5,8. Music-based interventions significantly reduce your pain when getting biopsies and surgery. They’re effective, non-pharmacological alternatives to pain reduction, but you would need 2–3 sessions per day, and using a board-certified music therapist to implement the interventions was important to reducing pain10.

References

1. Klemm & Hardi (2007). Depression in Internet and Face-to-Face Cancer Support Groups: A Pilot Study. https://onf.ons.org/onf/29/4/depression-internet-and-face-face-cancer-support-groups-pilot-study
2. Carlson et al. (2004). High levels of untreated distress and fatigue in cancer patients. https://www.nature.com/articles/6601887
3. Cleeland (1984). The impact of pain on the patient with cancer. https://acsjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/1097-0142(19841201)54:2+%3C2635::AID-CNCR2820541407%3E3.0.CO;2-P
4. Li et al. (2020). The effectiveness of music therapy for patients with cancer: A systematic review and meta‐analysis. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32017183/
5. Wang, Zhang, Fan, Tan, & Lei (2018). Effects of Music Intervention on the Physical and Mental Status of Patients with Breast Cancer: A SystematicReview and Meta-Analysis. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30069179/
6. Bro et al. (2017). Kind of Blue: A Systematic Review and Meta-analysis of Music Interventions in Cancer Treatment https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28626867/
7. Qi et al. (2021). Music interventions can alleviate cancer-related fatigue: a metaanalysis https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33481115/
8. Yangoz & Ozer (2019). The effect of music intervention on patients with cancer‐related pain: A systematic review and meta‐analysis of randomized controlled trials. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31452232/
9. Wu et al. (2021) Effectiveness of different music interventions on managing symptoms in cancer survivors: A meta-analysis. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34020137/
10. Hung, Liu, Tsai, & Lin (2018). The Pain-Relief Efficacy of Passive Music-Based Interventions in Cancer Patients Undergoing Diagnostic Biopsies and Surgery: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/29405022/