Health through music and song

Our world is filled with music. From the great symphony halls to the blaring boom boxes of summer; from the lullabies that drift babies to sleep to the spiritual music that inspires us; from weddings to funerals; from cell phone rings to marching bands to singing in the shower. Music can soothe or arouse, excite or relax us. It is perhaps the oldest language and it carries messages and affects how we respond to stimuli.

Music has also been used to convey messages for health and healing. Songs have been a principal means of preserving oral history before the written word, and music has been associated with healing since antiquity. The Greek god, Apollo, had dominion over both music and health; the Renaissance healer, Maimonides, was the first to prescribe music for healing the soul; and Native American Shamans played music while delivering their incantations and treatments.

During the past few years, the power of music has been harnessed as treatment in the form of Music Therapy, especially for chronic diseases. After a stroke, people with difficulty speaking can learn to sing before they speak. Those having difficulty walking can learn movement through dance with music.

Music is also being used, particularly outside of the United States, to help prevent illnesses or to change behavior in a positive way. “Message songs” have been used as part of prenatal education in Mexico and water hygiene education programs in Bolivia. In the West African country of Benin, the village nurse travels with a village singer to inspire people to change their behaviors by singing about health issues. Most of the prenatal villagers there were uninterested in written material about nutrition and childhood vaccinations, however responded to the same material when placed into songs. Similar education was achieved about cholera and the need for water hygiene. In less than ten minutes, a song could be learned that taught the fundamentals of boiling water before drinking it and washing one's hands and one's children's hands before eating.

One Harvard Medical School student traveled to Guatemala to study how best to teach schoolchildren about personal hygiene and parasitic infections. Three third-grade classes from three different villages were taught for one hour each week for four weeks. After the short didactic sessions, in two of the villages they played a question and answer game that emphasized the main points from the lectures. In the third village, after the didactic sessions, the question and answer game was replaced with message songs. The children who received the songs for reinforcement learned the material more readily and were able to go over it repeatedly by singing the messages.

In 2000, Oxfam (Oxford Famine Relief) Hygiene promoters developed a song for refuges in Nyawama camp, Sierra Leone to help prevent dysentery. Their ‘health songs’, which encouraged people to take basic health-care precautions, include recipes for making oral-rehydration drinks from salt, sugar, and boiled water and helped to prevent dysentery from spreading or from being as lethal once contracted.

A similar program was launched in 2004 by The International Centre for Eye Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine. It was a popular means of transmitting simple ‘nuggets’ of information to raise awareness about trachoma. The BBC World Service Trust developed radio spots in local languages in several countries, including Tanzania, Ghana, Niger, Ethiopia and Nepal. These trachoma message songs were broadcast several times per day for a number of months. In Ghana, they found that the trachoma song played on the radio was very well received and women and children in every village they visited could sing the song and understood key messages.

The United States also has a great need for improving health literacy to prevent illness. According to a 2004 report from the Institutes of Medicine, half the adult population of the United States—90 million Americans—are health illiterate. Health literacy is defined as the degree to which individuals have the capacity to obtain, process, and understand basic information and services needed to make appropriate decisions regarding their health. Music offers a means to carry simplified important health messages while allowing the messages to be changed according to the appeal of a wide range of cultures and backgrounds of the audience.

Studies also show that people from all ages, races, and socioeconomic levels are challenged by this problem. According to the American Medical Association, individuals with low health literacy incur medical expenses that are up to four times greater than patients with adequate literacy skills, costing the health care system billions of dollars every year for unnecessary doctor visits and hospital stays. Compounding the problem is the fact that most patients hide their confusion from their doctors because they are ashamed and intimidated to ask for help.

Examples of a wide range of potentially preventable diseases and conditions that health songs can affect include obesity, smoking related illnesses, sexually transmitted diseases, diabetes, and certain cancers. Infertility would also be much more treatable if patients came to the doctor sooner. For this reason, I created HealthRock™ (www.healthrock.com) whose mission is to use music and animation for health education in order to bring about positive behavior change. I am honored to be the recipient of the 2005 ASRM/Freedom Drug Consumer Education Award for the musical animation Making A Baby Takes Time. I hope this musical animated message will help couples realize the importance of seeking infertility consultation in a timely manner.