The Power of Music

Music can literally work wonders for people with Parkinson’s, dementia, or strokes. A leading music therapist talks about how caregivers can make the best use of it.

Camille Peri, Caring.com features editor

A man in his late 60s has a stroke and loses his speech. After two years of intense speech therapy, he still can’t talk. From a treatment standpoint, he’s considered “hopeless.”

A music therapist hears him singing a few words — all that he can get out — of “Ol’ Man River” and begins singing with him or accompanying him on the accordion a few times a week. Within two months, he’s crooning that entire song, and others, and has begun to recover his speech.

Worried About Alzheimer’s?

If it sounds like something you’d read in a book by Oliver Sacks — the neurologist whose work with near-catatonic “sleeping sickness” survivors was the basis for his book and later the film Awakenings – it is. The music therapist was Sacks’s longtime colleague Concetta Tomaino, and the story is one he recounts in Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.

With strong interests in both medicine and music, Tomaino earned a doctorate in music therapy from New York University at a time when “music programs” in nursing homes existed mostly to kill time, and there was little research on music’s relationship with the brain. For the last 30 years, she’s been in the forefront of the field, demonstrating how song can change the way we see and treat people with dementia, stroke, Parkinson’s, and brain damage — people whom other therapies have often failed to reach.

Tomaino’s work shows music’s profound ability to help recover memory and speech and improve physical movement and attention. On a simpler level, she says, music can be used to address daily caregiving challenges, such as coaxing a stubborn family member with Alzheimer’s or calming a nervous one.

Tomaino is cofounder and director of the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function (where Sacks is the honorary medical advisor) and vice president for Music Therapy Services at Beth Abraham Family of Health Services.

She spoke with Caring.com about how music therapy works, how caregivers can use it, and why music is the last memory to go. She also offered advice on using music early on to help people with Alzheimer’s as the disease progresses.

The Power of Music originally appeared on Caring.com.

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Disclaimer: The views expressed above are solely those of the author and may not reflect those of
Care2, Inc., its employees or advertisers.

Paula H.

1:39PM PDT on May 29, 2011

noted with thanks for the article and the great comments!

send a green star

patti n.

9:18AM PDT on Mar 25, 2011

Many of my fondest memories with my family are set to music in my mind.

Nancy S.

6:39PM PST on Mar 8, 2011

Alicia T.

2:16AM PST on Mar 7, 2011

terrific!

Olga L.

11:26AM PST on Mar 6, 2011

Music is the real medicine for good life! Our best moments in life are always remembered by a specific song. Great article!

Faith B.

11:14AM PST on Mar 6, 2011

great info thanks :)

Past Member .

11:21PM PST on Mar 5, 2011

Meneer Farrokh

Loo S.

6:35PM PST on Mar 5, 2011

thanks for sharing.

ii q.

11:01AM PST on Mar 5, 2011

Take a music bath once or twice a week for a few seasons, and you will find that it is to the soul what the water bath is to the body.

--- Oliver Wendell Holmes

10:54AM PST on Mar 5, 2011

"Bach gave us God's Word.
Mozart gave us God's laughter.
Beethoven gave us God's fire.
God gave us Music that we might pray without words."

- quote from outside an old opera house