Cancer and other life-threatening conditions
Treatment of life-threatening illness
Cancer, currently estimated to affect one in three people during their life, is the commonest life-threatening illness. Others include immunodeficiency diseases, metabolic disorders and irreversible organ failure. People of all ages are affected.
Medical treatment may be painful and may involve long periods of hospitalisation and time spent in isolation. Both patients and their families are placed under enormous stress and often have to cope with lack of autonomy and feelings of helplessness and uncertainty.
Music therapy offers an opportunity to play, sing, listen, compose, record or learn instruments. It can take place in a dedicated room or at the bedside. Live music can bring together the whole ward or unit, involving staff as well as patients and families.
Benefits may include:
- An opportunity to take a patient’s mind off gruelling and often painful treatment
- Assertion of autonomy and choice which has been taken away in other areas
- Easing anxiety, enabling person to cope with other treatments better
- Developing new skills and having an opportunity to focus on something other than the illness
- Providing an opportunity to talk and sing about difficulties of situation
- Maintaining social relationships; enabling a family to experience a sense of normality and fun in a stressful environment.
Palliative (end-of-life) care
For those facing death, the opportunity to be creative in musical activity can be an accompaniment on their journey. The formats in which music is offered are variable and flexible and people are facilitated to play, sing or listen to music in a way that is right for them.
Benefits may include:
- enabling mourning and grieving
- helping to accommodate feelings of loss, isolation and abandonment
- to make sense of suffering and of dying; to accept and forgive
- developing creative expression and being enabled to celebrate life
- being empowered to endure the situation and find healing and meaning, hope, and a sense of purpose
- maintaining independence
- Comfort and support for patients and their families
- music therapists may offer after-care for bereaved family members e.g. performing at a funeral, or providing recordings of music of the person who has died.
Look up the Research evidence for using music therapy to help people with difficulties with life-threatening conditions or death.
