Music therapy: What to know as an osteopathic physician

Certain songs can transport you to a meaningful time in your life, prompt you to tap your foot without realizing it and evoke complex emotions that are otherwise difficult to process. Music is as innate to human experience as breathing.

While common to our everyday lives, music is a complex phenomenon with an undeniable power to modify your mood and physiology. I periodically come across writings that highlight this simple observation, presented by well-meaning healthcare professionals who envision great clinical applications for music.

Music is a powerful and constant mediating force in our lives. The power of music has inspired ongoing efforts to harness its clinical potential. In fact, one often finds, in social media posts, online magazine articles and even peer-reviewed journals, a tone of revelation regarding the power of music to help patients. However, this is not always accompanied by an understanding or acknowledgement of the fields that are specifically built on it.

The applications of music in healthcare are vast, ranging from nurses using recorded music to calm an agitated patient, speech-language pathologists harnessing neuroprocessing of melody and rhythm to aid in aphasia recovery, and psychotherapists capitalizing on the limbic responses from music to help clients discuss difficult feelings; this leads us to the area of music therapy, a clinical field defined by its use of music for positive change.

My own background in music therapy

In 2014, I completed my university coursework along with 1200 hours of clinical training and passed my board exam to earn my music therapist-board certified (MT-BC) credential. I then promptly received my first full-time music therapy job in a pediatric hospital.

While I knew music therapy was a small profession, there were 6,323 MT-BCs in the country at the time. That number has since grown to over 10,600 in 2025.

I had underestimated how much I would need to advocate for the service. I was literally doing elevator pitches every day, reminding curious physicians that they could consult music therapy through the EMR to help patients with breakthrough pain, help someone with a new life-limiting diagnosis adjust to the hospital environment or support a family in creating memories and legacies for their child at end-of-life.

At times, when physicians thanked me for volunteering, called me to sing happy birthday to a staff member or assumed my service was packaged with the pet therapy visits, I would gently remind them the difference between just playing music for entertainment and the practice of music therapy, in which music interventions are delivered for the sake of a clinical goal. 

Of course the best advocacy was the actual work, like the time I worked with a child with cancer to write and record a song he could give to his family in his final days with them, or the times I was called to hold and sing to an infant with neonatal opioid withdrawal syndrome who had been crying for hours.

Or when a new teenage patient wouldn’t talk to anyone but would express frustrations and anger by listening to and playing music. Music therapy is something best experienced or observed, rather than described on paper. After all, the entire foundation of the practice relies on the qualities and effects of music, a highly complex phenomenon with deep evolutionary roots, something culturally dependent, and a stimulus perceived, neurologically processed and utilized with extreme variability.

In many ways, music therapy is about as esoteric as osteopathic manipulative medicine, a highly specialized field with limited clinicians who find creative ways to advocate for an effective but sometimes misunderstood practice. With that in mind, let’s break down what music therapy is.

What is music therapy?

If you ask a music therapist in person to define their profession, you might hear things like “it’s the use of music to treat non-musical goals” or “music therapy is the evidence-based practice of music-based interventions within a therapeutic relationship to target clinical goals by board-certified music therapists.”

Unfortunately, for someone just hearing about music therapy, it’s simply impossible to describe the entire profession in a minute or less. Furthermore, music therapists work with so many different populations and settings, including special needs schools, hospitals, rehabilitation centers, psychiatric facilities, prisons and private practices.

Music therapy is a diverse profession. Unlike speech therapy or physical therapy, music therapy is defined by its modality (music and music interventions), rather than its population or clinical scope. You might get a different picture of what music therapy looks like depending on the specialization of the music therapist you talk to.

The concept of “music for non-musical goals” is a concise and easy-to-understand description for most healthcare workers. It’s relatable, since their immediate interests are the quality of care and outcomes of their patients.

For example, consulting the music therapist to support pain management goals means asking a music therapist to find a music-based intervention that would help reduce the perception of pain for that patient. Guided imagery and music with progressive muscle relaxation is an option, or perhaps an entrainment of musical qualities like rhythm to the patient’s heart rate or breathing, slowing the guitar strums to modify these vitals and cue relaxation.

The music therapist would consult the chart for background, meet with the nurse, develop a plan with the patient, implement the intervention and document.

Other examples include:

• Engaging a child with autism in a group song, incorporating instrument playing and sequences of passing instruments to others in the group via musical prompts, supporting goals of social collaboration and interaction.
• Facilitating a familiar song for someone with dementia and their partner, engaging them in singing or instrument-playing with the song, and teaching them corresponding sign language, supporting goals of interpersonal connection and communication abilities.
• Recording a heartbeat of a preterm infant with a life-threatening illness, pairing this heartbeat with instrumental music meaningful to the family, and providing this recording to the family as a way for them to retrieve positive memories in the grief process.
• Focused rhythmic breathing to a familiar song, or via wind instrument playing, to promote diaphragmatic engagement and restore autonomic balance, supporting goals of anxiety and pain management.

How physicians can work with music therapists

Although music therapy is grounded in an art form, there is a lot of scientific research to support its intervention (see Cochrane Reviews on music therapy interventions for patients with cancer, depression and dementia for a start). Like medicine, music therapy can be understood as both an art and a science, though compared to medicine, the art component is more clearly forward-facing.

In many ways, my experience as a music therapist inspired my calling as a future osteopathic physician. It became clear in my interviews with osteopathic medical schools that my music therapy background was valuable—that the osteopathic practice of medicine demands unique creativity in practice. I chose osteopathic medicine to further embrace the art form in practice—to be the best mental health clinician and psychiatrist possible.

It is self-evident that music is a pervasive human experience. In this regard, maybe music therapy targets both musical and non-musical goals, the way the melodic prosody in our voice can reflect meaning, the natural rhythm of our heartbeats, breath and steps, and even the resonant frequencies of cells, all which make us highly musical beings.

It is probably not necessary to get this philosophical the next time you encounter a music therapist, but maybe you can ask them if they have a clinical use of music for a patient you care for. Maybe you can sit in on a session, connect with a patient through music and see how it works, or perhaps you have an idea on how you could use music in your practice of medicine.

A music therapist would be your greatest source of information and guidance. Remember that music therapists are trained in assessment and clinical intervention—they are not just there to entertain or perform. Music therapists are typically eager for collaborative interactions with other healthcare professionals and ultimately interested in working toward the same goal as other healthcare professionals—improving their patients’ lives.

Related reading:

How physical activity trains our brains for medicine—and how to fit it into your schedule when you’re in training

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