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Music is a great mood enhancer. When we feel low or depressed, the first thing that we reach out to is our playlist. It s true that it has a short term impact in helping us deal with stressful or depressing situations but, does music also help in the long term? Here is what experts have said about this. According to the researchers at Michigan State University, music does have an impact on our mood. Moreover, they also stated that music can help improve the efficacy of medications.
Music has already been used in previous researches as a tool to treat pain and anxiety. The researcher at Michigan has taken it up a notch to prove that it also helps improve the effectiveness of drugs. Experts have studied the effect of music-listening on chemotherapy-induced nausea.
Chemotherapy-induced nausea is not a condition of the stomach but of a neurological one. Experts state that neurological phenomenon could be treated by music listening. Previously conducted experiment also focused on treating neurological conditions like pain and anxiety which are both interpreted in the brain as a state.
The study that was conducted to prove this research question included 12 patients who were undergoing chemotherapy at the time. The process that followed was, each time the patients were to take their anti-nausea medication, they had agreed to listen to their favorite track for about 30 minutes. the music intervention was repeated each time they felt nauseous because of the medicine and this was continued over the five days beyond their chemotherapy treatment. The patients in the study provided a total of 64 events.
During that previous study, researchers found that patients who listened to pleasant music experienced the lowest levels of serotonin release, indicating that the serotonin stayed in the blood platelets and was not released to circulate throughout the body. Results also showed that after listening to music they found unpleasant, patients experienced greater stress and increased levels of serotonin release.
This was intriguing because it provides a neurochemical explanation and a possible way to measure serotonin and the blood platelet release of serotonin in my study," experts have noted adding, "In 10 to 20 years, wouldn't it be neat if you could use a nonpharmacological intervention like listening to 10 minutes of your favorite music to complement a medicine?"