Insights

November is National Hospice and Palliative Care Month. It seems that there is a month, a week or a day for so many things; doughnut day, doggy day, ice cream day and many other good causes like Breast Cancer Awareness Month. Each year National Hospice and Palliative Care Association determines a theme for Hospice and Palliative Care month. This year the theme is “Hospice Helps Everyone”…sounds good, right? How does hospice help everyone? I believe the Moments of Life campaign captures it best by saying hospice offers more; more comfort, more peace, more support, more joy and more moments.

More might not be what comes to mind when many people think about hospice. However, I see evidence of this every day in the work done at Emmanuel Hospice. One of the ways we offer more is through our Music Therapy program.

We partner with The Franciscan Life Process Center to provide specialized comfort, peace, joy and overall wellness to those we serve through music. Music Therapy is provided by a Music Therapist who is Board Certified (MT-BC). The therapist with Emmanuel Hospice, Miranda Eden, is also certified in Hospice and Palliative Care.

At Emmanuel Hospice we value the way in which Music Therapy is able to add more life to the days of those we serve and even helps to alleviate suffering that is difficult to manage in some cases. Below are just a few of the reasons we believe that Music Therapy is vital to the overall wellness of those we serve and to our mission:

• Music Therapy is a powerful non-invasive medium providing opportunities for healing, reflection, and expression.
• Music is a form of stimulation, which provokes responses due to the familiarity, predictability and feelings of security associate with it.
• Music Therapist use active music experiences to facilitate changes (physical, emotional and spiritual), contribute to quality of life and provide opportunities for reminiscing as music accesses a part of the brain that other forms of stimulation do not. In fact music accesses ALL parts of the brain!
• Patients participate in any of the following ways; song writing, lyric analysis, active listening, music performance, improvisation.
• Some of the symptoms improved with the use of Music Therapy are; loneliness, boredom, pain, restlessness, rapid respiration, grief, anxiety, depression, elevated blood pressure and heart rate, relaxation for the entire family and caregivers.

I will never forget the first time I was present for a Music Therapy session. The person was extremely short and breathe, anxious and breathing rapidly. The therapist came in and began playing music at the same tempo as the person was breathing then gradually slowed the tempo of the music-in a matter of 20 minutes the person was breathing normally and overcome with peace. There are countless stories of how Music Therapy has improved the quality of life for countless individuals. Visit the September blog written by Miranda describing additional ways in which Music Therapy has touched the lives of those we serve at http://emmanuelhospice.org/2015/09/hospice-music-therapy/.

For additional information about Music Therapy you can go to http://www.lifeprocesscenter.org/musictherapy.htm or http://musictherapy.org.