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10
Reasons to Include Music in Your Life
There
is now so much available scientific evidence that music
is measurably beneficial to us when we are sick AND when
we are well. This except below is taken from a recent article
titled "Now Listen: Music
a Medicine for Malady" by Jane Richards SYDNEY
MORNING HERALD Health Section (18th Sept 2008)
"Baby
Knows Best
Lullabies can do more than soothe babies to sleep. A three-year
study, Music Therapy for Vulnerable Infants, found that
seriously ill babies who were in hospital for various reasons,
including cardiac problems and surgery, showed physical
improvements after being sung to. Dr Helen Shoemark, senior
music therapist for the neonate and infant program at the
Royal Children's Hospital, Melbourne, said the study, completed
in 2005, showed music therapy was an affordable, effective
investment.
During the study, run by the hospital with the University
of Western Sydney, 10 sick babies were sung to three times
a week over four weeks by Shoemark and their parents. The
babies, many of whom were attached to hospital machinery,
were not held while they were sung to. Another 10 babies
at the same hospital matched on a severity of illness and
age and weight scale were not sung to. The results were
then compared to a group of 20 healthy babies at another
hospital.
"The babies who did get the singing improved and started
to come up to meet healthy prenatal criteria," Shoemark
said. "Their neuro-behavioural development scores significantly
improved." The neuro-behavioural scores - measuring
stress indicators such as irritability and crying - of the
sick babies who were not sung to deteriorated."
Read
the full article
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