Increasingly socialized, he soon may be discharged to a halfway house. A dental patient, unable to take standard painkillers like Novocain, dons stereo headphones and listens, rapt, to his favorite Broadway show tunes, barely aware that his dentist is drilling and scraping away, fitting the man with a complicated porcelain crown. Barely a half-century old, music therapy is increasingly being used to enhance the quality of life for, and in some cases actually help cure, people with a range of psychological and physical afflictions, from brain trauma to Alzheimer's disease, from substance abuse problems to chronic pain, from the isolation of retardation to the stress and discomfort of childbirth. The efficacy of music is becoming ever more obvious, even if the exact mechanism of its magic is still not very well understood. Many of the people I work with have profound disabilities, and some of them are not able to communicate their thoughts or feelings in a conventional way.
Music can be the only avenue they have.
For instance, we find that many of them can be let to singing, and for some of these people it's an expression of something outside themselves they would not be otherwise able to make. I have one profoundly retarded man who cannot express himself at all in verbal terms and whose awareness of the world around him sometimes seems questionable. But certain music will bring an uncontrolled flow of tears. It's a very powerful thing. The use of music as a healing agent is, in the broadest sense, centuries old.