JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Postoperative patients who previously engaged in the live musical intervention Meaningful Music in Healthcare (MiMiC) reported significantly reduced perception of pain than patients without the intervention. This encouraging finding indicates a potential for postsurgical musical interventions to have a place in standard care as therapeutic pain relief. However, live music is logistically complex in hospital settings, and previous studies have reported the more cost-effective recorded music to serve a similar pain-reducing function in post-surgical patients. Moreover, little is known about the potential underlying physiological mechanisms that may be responsible for the reduced pain perceived by patients after live music intervention.

Objective:

The primary objective is to see whether a live music intervention can significantly lower perceived postoperative pain compared to recorded music intervention and do-nothing control. The secondary objective is to explore neuroinflammatory underpinnings of postoperative pain, and the potential role of music intervention in mitigating neuroinflammation.

Methods:

This intervention study will compare subjective postsurgical pain ratings among three groups: live music intervention, recorded music intervention, and standard care control. The design will take the form of an on-off non-randomized controlled trial (NCT, Mathe et al., 2015). Adult patients undergoing elective surgery will be invited to participate. Intervention is a daily music session of up to 30 minutes for a maximum of five days. The live music intervention group is visited by professional musicians once a day for 15 minutes and asked to interact. The recorded music, active control intervention group receives 15 minutes of pre-selected music over headphones. The do-nothing group receives typical post-surgical care that does not include music.

Results:

At study completion, we will have empirical indication of whether live music or recorded music have significant impact on postoperative perceived pain. We hypothesize that the live music intervention will have more impact than recorded music, but that both will reduce perceived pain more than care-as-usual. We will moreover have preliminary evidence of physiological underpinnings responsible for reducing perceived pain during a music intervention, from which hypotheses for future research may be derived.

Conclusions:

Live music can provide relief from experienced pain to patients recovering from surgery, however the cost of live music needs to be justified when recorded music is more cheaply available. Upon completion, our study will be able to statistically compare live vs recorded music. We will moreover be able to provide insight into neurophysiological mechanisms involved in reduced pain perception as a result of postoperative music listening. Clinical Trial: The trial is registered with the Netherlands central commission of human research (CCMO-register number NL76900.042.21) at toetsingonline.nl.