Healing power of music

"A study conducted at London's Chelsea and Westminster Hospital between 1999 and 2002 found the level of the stress hormone cortisol was forty-eight per cent lower in patents who had been exposed to soothing visual art or live music than in those who had not experienced either. Anxiety was thirty-two per cent lower and depression thirty-one per cent lower in patients after listening to music. A German doctor, Ralph Spintge, has in recent years assembled similar data on one hundred and fifty thousand surgical and pain patients. He found that if he played music during certain clinical procedures he could reduce the patents' subsequent drug dosages by half because the biochemistry of their blood was altered. " Life In His Hands, The true story of a Neurosurgeon and a Pianist by Susan Wyndham