On Aug 2, 2005, at 10:07 AM, Andrew Stiller wrote:
My wife is a nurse practitioner at the local VA nursing home, wh.
offers a variety of adjuvant therapies including music therapy. The
point of music therapy is to use music to help people with
neurological problems to focus and find workarounds for their
condition. Music, for example, is a tremendous help in memorizing
words--all of us know that a poem is much easier to remember when it
is sung. So people with stutters or word-finding difficulties can be
and are helped by using musical mnemonics to get around the places
they get stuck. Similarly, music can help with coordinating motions,
retrieving memories, and so on.
That's what music therapy is, and does. It has a long, long history,
and it works. A lot of us have a visceral negative reaction to the
sight of a bunch of gorked-out elders vaguely trying to get through
Mary Had a Little Lamb--but the fact is that this stuff helps them.
The point is good medicine, not good music.
My high school music teacher got the left side of his skull caved in by
a car accident that left him partially paralysed on his right side.
They told him he would never regain complete use of his right side, and
forget playing organ; the best he could hope for was walking with a
cane (rather than confined to a wheelchair) and not drooling too much.
He had an organ in his basement, however (a full pipe organ salvaged
from a church slated for demolition) and after a year of daily practice
he was playing away with both hands and feet at the same speed as each
other. His speech is perfect, he has no discernable limp, and he can
play trombone as well as before, too. His physical therapist was so
impressed that she wrote him up as a subject for a paper. She theorised
that playing organ requires so much coordinated limb movement and that
music in general uses so much of the brain that all the damaged areas
were reassigned more quickly and completely than if he hadn't played
organ.
So while I'm not convinced about his "molecules" vibrating to the
music, I think music gave him his body back, and that's good enough for
me.
Christopher
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