Study Finds Music Soothes Surgeons : Medicine: Researcher says playing a doctor’s selections in the operating room lowers stress. Some say songs help to relax tensions or pick up the pace.
It was an emergency appendectomy that taught Karen Allen her first lesson in the work habits of surgeons. As hospital orderlies wheeled her into the operating room, Allen, a University of Buffalo behavioral researcher who specializes in the study of stress, was startled to hear music--a Mozart clarinet sonata, one of her favorite pieces.
“If I live through this,” she thought as she drifted off under anesthesia, “I want to study it.”
So study it she did--with intriguing results.
From Mozart to Madonna, Beethoven to the Beatles, Allen has found that music may help surgeons perform better in the operating room by keeping their stress levels down. And the type of music--classical, jazz, rock ‘n’ roll, rap--makes no difference, she said, so long as the tunes are of the surgeon’s own choosing.
Allen’s study, published in today’s issue of the Journal of the American Medical Assn., is apparently the first to document the effects of music on surgeons. While patients might not like the idea of a knife-wielding doctor boogieing to the strains, say, of 10,000 Maniacs, the study’s findings come as little surprise to those who make their living repairing the human body.
Indeed, music is so much in demand in the operating room that surgeons, nurses and anesthesiologists often spend time debating just who gets to control the dial. The surgeon, true to the stereotype of the hard-driving profession, usually prevails.
But not always, says Dr. James Piper, director of liver transplants at the University of Chicago Medical Center.
“I trained at the University of Iowa, and the head nurse there banned music in the ORs and it was terrible,” Piper said. “As soon as I left there the first thing I did was buy myself a CD boombox-type thing and I’ve been playing music in the OR ever since.”
While he sometimes gives in to scrub nurses who request jazz, Piper is a rock ‘n’ roll oldies man, preferring to slice and stitch to the beat of Billy Joel, Genesis, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
While not all surgeons listen to music--some insist on quiet--those who do said in interviews that it relaxes them, and helps pick up the pace when an operation grows monotonous. At Childrens Hospital in Los Angeles, Dr. Corey Raffel, a pediatric neurosurgeon who is a fan of the Eagles, Cream and Eric Clapton, says he turns off the music when he is “in the meat of a difficult case.”
But he is rarely without tunes at the end of an operation, when the surgical team is tired and all that is left to do is sew the patient up.
“That’s when we listen to Led Zeppelin,” he says.
While previous research has shown that music can be used to relax patients, Allen says no one before her has looked at whether the same is true of surgeons. For her study, she enlisted 50 male doctors--she did not intend to exclude women, she said, but only men volunteered--all of whom listen to music during surgery.
She put them in a laboratory and asked them to perform difficult mental arithmetic problems out loud, a standard technique for measuring stress. The doctors were asked, for instance, to begin counting backward, at intervals of 13, 17 or 23, beginning with a six-digit number.
Each surgeon was hooked up to monitors that measure physiological indicators of stress--blood pressure, pulse rate and sweating. While they were being monitored, the surgeons performed the arithmetic twice under three conditions--once while listening to music they selected; once while listening to Pachelbel’s Canon in D, which is often used in commercial stress reduction tapes, and once during silence.
The doctors ranged in age from 31 to 61. All but four picked classical music--Vivaldi, Allen said, was especially popular. Other surgeons say they find classical music distracting.
“You know how it goes real quiet and then, ba ba ba boom!” said Dr. Susan Downey, a plastic surgeon and colleague of Raffel’s at Childrens Hospital. “Classical is not good to listen to in the OR.” Most of the surgeons she knows, she says, listen to soft rock or country, but one listens to talk radio.
Of the remaining four doctors in Allen’s study, two listened to jazz and one chose Celtic harp music. The rowdiest selection was James Galway and the Chieftans playing Irish folk music.
“This particular thing is so noisy,” Allen said, “I don’t know as I’d want to play it in surgery. People are just whooping it up, the tin whistles are going, the drums are beating. It’s like you’re at a block party.”
Across the board, Allen found that the doctors’ performance--as measured by the accuracy and speed with which they completed the math problems--was better when they were listening to music they picked. Blood pressure, pulse and sweating were lower. She said the study confirms the importance of a doctors’ own musical tastes, no matter what they are.
For instance, the average pulse rate while doing the arithmetic was 78 beats per minute if the surgeon selected his own music, compared to 100 during the soothing sounds of Pachelbel and without music. Blood pressure rose significantly during silence, to a state of borderline hypertension--an average of 140/100.
“The silence was the worst,” Allen said.
Piper, the liver transplant surgeon in Chicago, agreed. “Liver transplants take five to six hours,” he said, “and there’s nothing worse than five hours of dead quiet.”
