Disclaimer: This is transcribed using AI. Expect (funny) errors.
Mindy Peterson: [00:00:00] I’m Mindy Peterson, and this is Enhance Life with Music, where we explore the ways music makes our lives better. My guest today is Dr. Alice Cash, a clinical musicologist based in Louisville, Kentucky. Dr. Cash holds a PhD in musicology, a master’s in piano performance and a master’s in social work. She has over 40 years of professional experience as a college professor, clinical therapist, solo and chamber music performer and composer. Dr. Cash’s clinical work at the University of Louisville led to her career in music medicine, where she developed expertise in the use of music in perioperative care. Welcome to Enhance Life with Music, Alice.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:00:46] Thank you so much, Mindy. I am so excited to be here with you today and to let people know about music medicine.
Mindy Peterson: [00:00:55] I’m really looking forward to our conversation and just from our conversation before I hit the record button, I’ll just tell listeners I want to be like Dr. Cash when I grow up. We just had a great time chatting and she is just involved in so many exciting things and I hope that I’m doing a lot of those types of things when I, like I said, when I grow up.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:01:19] Oh, well, thank you. Thank you.
Mindy Peterson: [00:01:21] Well, yeah. Well, kicking things off for listeners who, like me, are not in the medical field, I’m just going to define what perioperative care is. It’s also known as perioperative medicine. It’s the practice of patient centered, multidisciplinary and integrated medical care of patients along the full continuum of periodic operative care from the moment of contemplation of surgery until full recovery. So starting out, how and when did you see the potential and develop such an interest in incorporating music into this surgical experience?
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:01:58] Well, let me backtrack first to how I got into music medicine period, because I had just gotten my PhD in musicology in 1990. And traditionally, musicology is more about music history, but it’s it’s always about research into music of some sort. So my PhD dissertation was actually about Wanda Landowska and the revival of the harpsichord. But as I was finishing that one day, I was down at the University of Louisville School of Music and I saw a poster on the bulletin board that was announcing three day long workshops. One music in your brain, one music in your health, and one music and wellness. And I thought, Oh, that sounds fascinating. I really I’ve got to go to those. And so I did end up going to all three daylong workshops that were taught by a man named Dr. Arthur Harvey. And at the end of those three days, I thought, Oh, this is what I want to do. This music medicine, which is different from music therapy. Yeah.
Mindy Peterson: [00:03:13] You want to clarify that real quick? Yeah.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:03:15] Let me just say a word about that. Music Medicine uses music as the intervention. Music therapy uses a music therapist and music as an intervention. So in other words, to have music therapy going on, you’ve got to have an actual registered board certified music therapist that is creating a relationship with the patient, finding out what kind of music they like, what their issues are that they are working on, and then creating a program with specific goals and steps to those goals.
Mindy Peterson: [00:03:53] Okay, So it’s more dependent on how that therapist is applying music in a given setting, right?
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:03:59] Right. And it’s extremely individualized. Music. Medicine is much more open to anybody. You don’t have to have a music therapist, but the music itself has been therapeutically developed or chosen. Curated is the word I like to use. And so you can use music in a therapeutic way. Nurses can do it. Even individuals like you and I that are already musicians. We can use music medicine for ourselves. Sure. So anyway, after I did the these three workshops at U of L and decided this was really what I wanted to do, the man who had given the workshops, Dr. Harvey, said, Alice, let me think about how we can get you into this, because there’s no degree in music medicine. You can get a degree in music therapy, but not in music medicine, which is much broader. And actually, I think music therapy is a part it’s a subheading under music, medicine, music, medicine is a much broader area. Okay. So I had just gotten my PhD, as I said, in musicology. So about six months later he called and he said, Alice, I want to basically slide you into my position here at the University of Louisville. I have been offered a wonderful job in Honolulu, teaching at the University of Hawaii and I would like to recommend you to take over my job here. And I was like, Oh my goodness, Arthur, thank you for thinking I could do that. But, you know, I haven’t had any formal training in music medicine. And he said, Don’t worry about that. You have a PhD in music. And Dr. Elky’s, the man who’s head of this program, will send you around the country to study with leaders in music, medicine. And he did that. I went to Boulder, Colorado, and studied with Don Campbell, who wrote the Mozart Effect. I went to Phoenix and studied with Dr. Alfred Tomatis, who has done so much work on music and learning and the brain and autistic children and things like that. So I pretty much did a crash self-education course.
Mindy Peterson: [00:06:19] It sounds like.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:06:19] It. And all of this. And the first thing that they wanted me to do some research in when I got to the University of Louisville was music with Alzheimer’s patients because my boss, Dr. Elky, said, Alice, my peers are being diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. He was late 70s at the time and he said We have lots of anecdotal reports about the benefits of music with Alzheimer’s, but we need some actual empirical studies that show how do you choose the right music for Alzheimer’s patients? How much do they need? What benefits do we get from doing the right music with them, and how long will these benefits last? Et cetera. He had a grant from the wonderful Fetzer Foundation in Michigan, I believe that paid for my salary for about seven years there doing research in music medicine. So we started out with music and Alzheimer’s. Then he wanted me to do a study about Psychophysiological benefits of chanting. Oh, and we. We found a local group of very experienced Buddhist chanters that did the Nam myoho renge kyo chant and we hooked them up to biofeedback equipment and measured their muscle relaxation and their breathing and their skin temperature and things before they chanted.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:07:49] And then while they were chanting and then while they were doing another vocal sort of activity, they were just reading aloud from a book. And when they started chanting, everything changed for the better and people calmed down. They were able to focus. Their skin temperature warmed up. It was just an amazing study. But anyway, at the same time, I started getting a lot of invitations to speak first locally and then out in the state and then eventually out in the country and even other countries. One of my friends said, Alice, a lot of the things that you talk about, you know, people know a little bit about it and you you add to that. But the one thing you talk about that nobody else that I know of is talking about is music with surgery. And I think you ought to consider really going deep into the benefits of music in the perioperative period, in other words, before, during and after surgery. So that was the beginning of it. Mindy right there.
Mindy Peterson: [00:08:55] Wow. Oh, very interesting. Well, tell us, what are some of the ways that music can improve the surgical experiences for patients and patient outcomes?
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:09:05] Okay. Well, most everybody has had some sort of procedure, Whether or not it was major surgery, it doesn’t matter. Even if you had like a filling at the dentist or. Yeah.
Mindy Peterson: [00:09:19] So let’s talk about what we are talking about by surgery. Because when I hear surgery, I think about the game operation. You know, it’s like all those little pieces that you have on the body, you know, operating on bones and organs and things like that. But you use these these processes, these this music, these soundtracks for labor and delivery, dental procedures, kidney dialysis. Like tell us about what we’re talking about when we talk about perioperative care. What procedures?
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:09:46] Right. Well, when I talk about music for surgery, I’m talking about any medical or dental procedure that causes anxiety. As I say, that could be anything from getting a filling at the dentist. I don’t even like getting my teeth cleaned because I don’t like that high speed whirring right near my ear and right near my face and all of that. But mean blood draws. I don’t know many people that say, Oh, I don’t mind having blood drawn. I mean, I know people who pass out, okay, they just see the needle. So there is a lot of anxiety around medical and dental procedures because it’s about anticipating pain. And when you are anticipating waiting that somebody might hurt you, not intentionally, but even accidentally, you tense up And the more you tense up, then the more novocaine or anxiety medication or anesthesia or even pain medication it takes in order to get you relaxed. So my idea was when somebody is getting ready to have a medical or dental procedure, whether major or minor, if they could have some headphones that would already have soothing, calming, beautiful music. And before you ever leave the house, lie down on the couch for maybe 15, 20, 30 minutes, put these headphones on, close your eyes and start deep breathing in and out, just like you would do with Lamaze or, you know, a childbirth method or any sort of calming breath related relaxation for people who don’t have the headphones. Now, once I created my headphones and had this idea, I got a patent on them and determined that no one else had done this, which was really kind of surprising because once I tell people, they’re like, Wow, it’s such a logical idea. I’m surprised nobody else had ever thought of that.
Mindy Peterson: [00:11:52] Yeah, well, and I want you to explain some more in a minute about exactly what those headsets are. But first, let’s just back up a little bit. You’ve done a lot of research on arts and medicine and tell us some more about what studies have shown about the results of using music for surgery. You just mentioned that it can really help before the procedure to calm people down, reduce anxiety, which reduces the need for like a reduced need for anesthesia.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:12:23] Well, the anesthesia is more during the surgery. Prior to surgery. Like if you go to a surgery center, let’s say, for cataract removal or joint replacement or even an endoscopy or a colonoscopy, a lot of times they will give you a Valium tablet as soon as you walk back there and start getting into the gown and starting an IV. They will either give you Valium or Xanax or they’ll put it in your IV. Okay. And yes, it’s very effective at calming you down and making you feel like, oh, this is no big deal. But it’s also potentially addictive. And many people have become they they take Valium every day because they like the way it makes them feel. So if we can reduce or even eliminate the need for what’s called benzodiazepines, that’s the Valium, Xanax, other kind of anti-anxiety drugs, by using music that’s the way to go. Okay. So that’s the preoperative use of it. Then intra op, you have the music taking you on into surgery. And the VA hospital here in Louisville did a study specifically on men having major abdominal surgery. So that would be like hernia surgery or bypass surgery of some sort. It found a significant decrease in the amount of pain medication they needed, and that would be opioids. And that was during surgery.
Mindy Peterson: [00:14:01] Or is this recovery or surgery?
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:14:03] Okay. Yeah. So I think this particular study was looking at opioid consumption. Okay. So you have to have pain medication during and after surgery. And the anxiety is mostly before surgery, there was, again, a significant a statistically significant reduction in the amount of opioids required in the patients that were using our playlists on headphones. But then there have been all kinds of other studies that you can see on my website showing music that was introduced in other ways. Sometimes hospitals want to just play the music through speakers in the ceiling or the walls of the Or. But many studies have found that when the music is coming through headphones, it’s much better because not only does it put the soothing music directly into the patient’s ear through the eighth cranial nerve, but it blocks conversations that the medical staff might be having that the patient doesn’t need to hear. Yeah. Things like, uh oh, this. This is worse than we thought. You know, this person isn’t going to be around long or, you know, they actually do say things like that thinking that the patient can’t hear.
Mindy Peterson: [00:15:23] Okay. Oh, wow. Well, I’m just thinking to the relaxing music that the patient will benefit from might not be as beneficial to the surgeon. Like, we don’t want the surgeon falling asleep, getting too relaxed.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:15:37] Exactly. So that’s one of the main reasons that I came up with this idea of the patient having headphones with slow, soothing, steady tempo because the surgeon often chooses upbeat tempo and music that will keep his energy level up. Yeah, and a nurse at one of the local hospitals here came to hear me speak and she said, Dr. Cash, we have a surgeon at our hospital who likes to operate to the Queen song. Another one bites the dust. Oh, And she said, I just think it’s awful. And I said, I totally agree. That should not be. That is not funny. You know, if he thinks it’s funny, it’s very disrespectful, sir.
Mindy Peterson: [00:16:23] Well, and then also, you I saw somewhere, I think on your website you mentioned what if the surgeons listen to listening to music that happens to be the patient’s breakup song or something like that, you know, Or it just has really significant connotations for them. So yeah.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:16:40] Because music has very powerful associations for people. Um, like you mentioned, the breakup song is one, but I had a lady say, I don’t want to hear Amazing Grace while I’m having surgery because that was played at my grandmother’s funeral. Sure loved her so much. Every time I hear that, it reminds me of my grandmother and I just start sobbing. Oh, sure. So.
Mindy Peterson: [00:17:04] Well. And I think your music, because of that reason, is not any well known tune at all. Right.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:17:12] Exactly. And so because I am a pianist, my classical playlist is all piano music. But it’s not Clair de Lune, it’s not Moonlight Sonata. It’s not anything that you might have played on a recital and. And had a memory slip. And you don’t want to be hearing that when you go into surgery.
Mindy Peterson: [00:17:31] So did you compose it just for use in these tracks?
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:17:34] I chose I curated classical piano pieces that had the characteristics I was looking for but were basically unfamiliar. The only familiar piece and we’ll hear that if we start the classical sample at the beginning to A Wild Rose by Edward MacDowell.
Mindy Peterson: [00:17:54] Okay.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:17:54] And a lot of people, especially older people, they played that when they were taking piano or maybe they heard their mother or their grandmother or their aunt, somebody that lived with them playing that on the piano. But the only comment I’ve ever had on that one piece to a wild rose, a lady who was a retired prima ballerina here in Louisville, she said, Oh, that was so reassuring to me when I heard that, because when I first started ballet, that was one of the songs they would play.
Mindy Peterson: [00:18:25] And the songs that you select, curate are there. I’m sure there are some proprietary information, but in what can you share with us about them? Like is there a certain beat that you’re looking for that is similar to a heart beat rate, or what are some of the things that characterize the music?
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:18:45] Yes, the music that I’m looking for has a slow, steady tempo that is similar, let’s say, or comparable to the resting healthy heartbeat. Okay. And the reason I came up with that idea was because when you’re anxious before surgery, you’re getting ready to have a procedure that you think might very well be painful. Your heart rate speeds up and your heart is really beating fast and your breathing is shallow and rapid. So thanks to a process called rhythmic entrainment, when you put the headphones on and you start listening to music that has that slow, steady tempo comparable to the resting healthy heartbeat, your heart rate and breathing automatically begin to synchronize with that. Ah yeah.
Mindy Peterson: [00:19:42] So, well, when you were talking about the monks chanting earlier in our conversation, as you were talking and describing it, I thought, I feel like my blood pressure is going down and I’m getting relaxed just listening to you talk about this chanting because pretty much chanting is all, you know, more of that slow rhythmic type of a pace. And so just thinking about it kind of helped me feel more relaxed.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:20:05] That’s wonderful. That’s wonderful. And I feel the same way. You know, I’ve asked myself many times if I wish I could do a study on myself because I would like to know if actually listening to a piece of beautiful music almost as good as thinking about that very same piece of music, sitting calmly in my chair and thinking about a piece of music that I find. I mean, I personally still love Pachelbel’s canon. I know a lot of people are tired of it because it’s been used to sell cars and champagne and all kinds of stuff, but I still find that such a beautiful piece.
Mindy Peterson: [00:20:42] Yeah, I do too. Yeah, Well.
Mindy Peterson: [00:20:44] And, and you’ve mentioned a lot of classical music, but your soundtracks, there are five different genres, shall we say, that that listeners can choose from. Classical being one, but also jazz, New Age lullabies and memory care playlists?
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:21:02] Correct. And let me just tell you a little bit about how I did that, because when the VA hospital here did their first study on the men with major abdominal surgery, the anesthesiologist was the one that was basically conducting the study and asking the the vets if they would like to be part of a study, listening to music through headphones. And she told them this is classical music. And some of them said, well, I don’t like classical music. I want to hear country music or I want to hear classic rock, like, you know, Beatles and stuff. And so we had to explain that that music is still under copyright and we would have to pay for the rights to use Beatles tunes or country music, anything like that. And that classical music was now in public domain. And one of my friends is actually playing the classical pieces. So there was no copyright issues. I paid him for the use of his playlist on my headphones. Okay. And that’s how we took care of that. But later on, a hospital wanted to use our headphones and they said, But we’ve got to offer at least two different genres. So I commissioned a jazz trio here in Louisville for the jazz playlist, and they. Specifically are just kind of improvising music that has the tempo of the resting healthy heartbeat in a jazz style.
Mindy Peterson: [00:22:35] Circling back to your headphones, you developed a patent for the headphones. They’re cordless. There’s a chip in it that plays music, and listeners also have some other options, I think, of utilizing your soundtracks with an app. Tell us some more about the headphones and what the different options are for listeners to access your soundtracks.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:22:54] Well, the headphones that we have now are what I call 3.0, because this is the third iteration of programmable headphones. The first headphone we sold had a built in MP3 player, so we just put the music on that. But we found out that the battery would not last more than probably a year. And I also found out that batteries have to be exorcised, so to speak. So if you wear the headphones for surgery and then you come home and you maybe use them for another week or two and then you put them in a drawer and you pull them out six months later, they may or may not work. So we came up with another headphone that I actually ordered from China that had the microSD card. But the problem with that was I had to order a thousand headphones at a time and I couldn’t even accommodate a thousand headphones in my house and fit myself and my family into. So we we sold those and then I found another headphone that I could order as I need. And I ordered the micro SD cards load the music on that. The hospital requests, like a lot of times a hospital will order 25 headphones and they want five classical five jazz, five New Age, five Lullaby and five memory care. And they distribute those headphones throughout the hospital in the geriatric area, in the newborn nursery, in the regular population that’s having just traditional surgeries. So that’s what I recommend. And honestly, I would love to see hospitals buy our headphones and actually give them to the patient when they leave the hospital.
Mindy Peterson: [00:24:43] Are well and your headphones are being used at some of the leading hospitals in the US and internationally. Can you say the names of the hospitals that are using them or not?
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:24:53] I can say that to two different Cleveland clinics. There are 20 Cleveland clinics in the world and the one in Cleveland and one in Florida are both using our headphones.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:25:05] Johns Hopkins is using our headphones. Mayo Clinic was the first to use them. They started out with post cardiac surgery. So the recovery area for cardiac patients, the headphones were very beneficial to people there. I would imagine. Now they’re using them in other areas of the hospital, too. The Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles has had them in their ICU. I know that. And a hospital in Korea is using them. Canada, I mean, Hawaii, they’re they’re in use around the country. But initially I was trying to offer them to patients and patients would order them off my website. And finally, people said, Alice, from a business perspective, you need to be marketing to hospitals. Sure, they need to be the ones to buy the the headphones and have them waiting for patients. And so that’s what I’m doing now. And I’m having a lot of success with VA hospitals around the country. A lot of them are ordering them. But then another person said, you should turn your playlist into apps so that patients can download the app or apps of their choice. So each playlist is an app and the Apple App Store.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:26:22] And I did have them also in the Google Play store. But so few people on the Google Play store downloaded them that now they’re just on the Apple App Store. Okay but they’re like 999 I think for a playlist and you have it forever. So when I go to the dentist, especially, I put my AirPods in and then I stream one of my playlists during the dental work. And if there’s going to be a lot of drilling, I usually put on the classical playlist.
Mindy Peterson: [00:26:55] Well, that’s yeah, that’s a great point. Is those sounds of the surgery itself, whether whether it’s drilling or sawing, you know, I mean, I had a dental procedure done. Oh, it feels like just yesterday, but it was probably like four years ago and I had half of my mouth done at one time and then went back six months later or three months. I don’t remember it later and had the other side done the second. The second time around I was much more mentally prepared. The first time I wasn’t really mentally prepared for what it was going to be like. And just the the feeling of tugging and the the sound of, you know, just I won’t go into it and gross people out. But it is it is. And so the second time around, I was much better prepared and had earbuds with me with things preloaded to listen to. But you point out in some of your materials that for some surgeries you need to be awake. And even if you’re sedated to some extent, you need to be awake. You need to be able to wiggle your toes when you’re asked to, for example, things like that. Right. And these headsets allow people to utilize this music therapeutically, but they can still hear commands when they need to. So that’s something that’s important to know. And then I heard you describe a situation, too, where even when people are out, whether because of anesthesia or even being in a coma, I was just fascinated by the story about how some of these patients still hear things. And you had that story about the person who was in a coma and later woke up and they could remember the music that was being played. One of the nurses would kind of hum or sing along with the music. Yes. And that patient came back later and asked to speak with the singing nurse because her singing, I think he said something like her. The sound of her singing is what was continually just leading me back to life or something like that.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:28:51] Exactly. It’s such a beautiful story. And the other nurses at the hospital were unaware that one nurse, when she would go into a patient’s room, even when they were in a coma, she still needed to do certain things, take their temperature and their vital signs and that she would just kind of be humming or sometimes whistling. And the patient said literally he was lying there in a coma, not knowing if he was alive or dead. But every time she would come in and hum or sing or whistle that let him know that he was still in the land of the living and would bring him back closer to life.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:29:31] Yeah, it’s amazing. It’s a beautiful thing.
Mindy Peterson: [00:29:34] Yeah, that’s pretty amazing. Do you have any other, like, favorite success story that you can share? Maybe. Were the use of your music tracks made a noticeable difference in a patient’s surgical journey or their recovery?
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:29:49] Oh, sure. There’s so many. It’s just deciding which one. I mean, there’s one about my mother because she was the first person I ever really tried this out on. I was in the midst of developing all of this and having these ideas kind of gelling in my mind. And suddenly I got a phone call one day from my sister in South Carolina, which is where I’m from, saying, Alice, Mama is getting ready to have cardio bypass surgery and you might want to come down because it’s it’s serious. So of course I was ready to go down immediately, but thought, wait a second, I need to take my headphones and some CDs and maybe she could listen during her surgery and it would make a difference and it would help. So I drove down to South Carolina with a stack of CDs. This was probably 1995, I think. And when I got there, I was so glad to see her still with us. And I said, Mama, would you be willing to listen to some music, some beautiful music? And at first she said, Alice, I don’t know. I don’t really like headphones. They mess up my hair. And, you know, I wouldn’t want to listen to just anything music that a lot of people liked, like harp music or something. She said, No, I don’t. I don’t really want to listen to that music. And I said, But Mama, this is this is what I do for a living. And I know this could make a wonderful, positive difference. And she said, okay, Alice, you pick out whatever music you think would be best as long as it’s not nearer My God to thee.
Mindy Peterson: [00:31:30] Oh, that’s pretty specific.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:31:33] And you know, she also knew that’s what they played when the Titanic was sinking, was Nearer My God To Thee.
Mindy Peterson: [00:31:39] Oh, wow.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:31:40] But anyway, she did wear the headphones. The surgeons and the anesthesiologist said, Sure, that sounds good. And what she actually did listen to was Handel’s Water Music Suite. So when the surgery was over, they called Daddy and me back to the recovery area. And as we approached her bed, she opened her eyes and she just immediately she said, Oh, Alice, the music was beautiful. Bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. And she sort of conducted a couple of bars with her hands. And I was like, wow, she just had major cardiac surgery. And she’s thinking about. The music and how beautiful it was. And she told me later, if I hadn’t had those headphones, there were patients in recovery on either side of me that just had a curtain and I could hear them moaning and crying out and calling for the nurses and the headphone kept me in my serenity zone.
Mindy Peterson: [00:32:48] Sure.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:32:49] Wow. So what a.
Mindy Peterson: [00:32:51] What a big.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:32:52] Success story. But on my website I have video testimonials of a dozen different people who had a dozen different kinds of surgery telling about how the headphones helped them and how they would never have surgery without them again.
Mindy Peterson: [00:33:08] Well, yeah, let’s tell people about your website and some of the resources that you have. The website is Surgical Serenity Solutions.com. And that’s the name of your your company or organization. Surgical Serenity Solutions helps hospitals and medical facilities that offer surgery, increase patient satisfaction and reduce anxiety and pain perception. Using your carefully curated music that uses that that power of rhythmic entrainment for stabilizing heart rate and breathing. So surgical serenity. Solutions.com And you mentioned earlier you have a lot of research studies posted there. There’s also a blog on the website. Yes, you have a YouTube channel. You mentioned your playlists available in the Apple App Store. Yes. Tell us about your book.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:33:58] My book I wrote about 2 or 3 years ago, and it’s called Having Surgery. Question mark Using music to reduce anxiety and pain perception. And it’s available on Amazon and you can get it in paperback or Kindle version. The book is divided into three sections one for the patient, one for the doctor, and then one that’s research for everybody to benefit from. And there are a lot of links on the book. That’s why probably the Kindle version is the easiest because.
Mindy Peterson: [00:34:37] It takes you right there.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:34:38] It has direct links to the to the App Store, to research studies. When I’m talking about specific kinds of surgery, it has links to the patient testimonials. I would love to see every hospital carry it in their gift shop, but of course the Kindle version, you have to get it on Amazon, but you don’t have to have a Kindle. All you need is the free Kindle app in order to read.
Mindy Peterson: [00:35:03] Yep, good point. We’ll include links for sure to all of these resources in the show notes. And I’ll just point out too, that on your website there are a couple of free reports that are available. One is for reasons to give patients music on headphones during medical procedures so people can read that report. And then there’s also a report on how to talk to your doctor about using music during surgery. Yes. So those are some really valuable resources to well, I’m sure listeners will want to check all those links out in the show notes and dig in to some more to these valuable resources. Alice, I ask all my guests to close out our conversation with a musical, ending a coda by sharing a song or story about a moment that music enhanced your life. Tell us about the the music that we’ll get to hear in closing here.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:35:57] I am happy that you’re going to play some samples from my playlist. So the first sample is from the classical playlist. And in this you will hear that specific piece I mentioned to A Wild Rose by MacDowell. And after that there’s similar short classical miniatures, and they have that slow, steady pulse. We believe that pure instrumental music is best No lyrics. So you want to play just a little bit of the classical playlist? Yeah, the second clip is the jazz playlist, because we knew that different people have preferences for different genres of music. We knew that jazz was something people were asking for. So I commissioned a local jazz trio to play 55 minutes of jazz style music that has the tempo of the resting healthy heartbeat. And we’ll hear a little of that. And then third, we have the New Age playlist, which is something completely different. This is more for the people who are into meditation and like that sort of dreamy new age type music that’s played on a synthesizer. And again, it has a pulse to it. It doesn’t have as strong a beat as classical or jazz, but it has a pulse to it so that you feel connected to that music and you can go into your relaxation Zen sort. Of state. The fourth playlist is the lullaby playlist, and these are familiar classic lullabies like Brahms Lullaby, played on the piano by me. Again, it’s about 50, 55 minutes of music. And they’re not just for kids. I think children and toddlers probably would enjoy this. And they have actually used our headphones before, but I have adults who say the lullaby playlist is my favorite.
Mindy Peterson: [00:37:57] Lullabies are for everybody.
Dr. Alice Cash: [00:37:58] That’s right. The last playlist is Memory Care, and this is for people who are probably in their 70s 80s 90s. That’s what I had in mind who have maybe lost touch with the music of today, and they feel very sort of lost. And this would be dementia and Alzheimer’s patients sometime. But hearing that familiar music from their courting years brings them back to orientation and helps them to remember what their life has been about and calm down and not feel so frightened. So the memory Care playlist again, it’s me playing on the piano songs from the 40s 30s 20s like Tiptoe Through the Tulips, Ain’t she sweet? Things like that. And my merry Oldsmobile. And it’s very, very comforting to elderly patients.
Transcribed by Sonix.ai