The power of music comforts patients undergoing palliative care and helps them and their loved ones through an extremely emotional and difficult time.
Melanie Ambler, a medical student and musician at Stanford University, is conducting a research project to explore how music can relieve some of that stress. Ambler takes a year off from school to interview 100 patients and play music for them.
Ambler visits them all in their hospital room, asks them a question and then composes an original song on her cello for them during their joint visit.
“I like to tell my patients that I play music that is improvised and inspired by whatever they tell me,” says Ambler. “It’s my most active form of listening.”
Ambler met 46-year-old Tasha Tevis, who has end-stage renal failure, while she was in intensive care. Ambler started their session by asking Tevis a question.
Ambler: “What does art mean to you?”
Tevis: “Art is beauty for me.”
When Tevis finished speaking, Ambler began playing her cello. Tevis closed her eyes and for a moment she was no longer in the hospital.
“There’s so much happiness going through my head,” Tevis said. “When you take a deep breath, everything washes away.”
This is more than just a service to these patients. Ambler believes it is real medicine. She explores how the experience affects patients and their loved ones, both physically and emotionally.
All patients receive an edited recording of their interview and a musical soundtrack after their session. A subset of those interviews are then recorded into a podcast or album for the public to listen to.
While most of the medical community focuses on preserving life, Ambler hopes her project will change the way doctors view death.
“We should be having more conversations about death and dying and palliative care and what that actually means,” Ambler said. “And the fact that so many of these stories that patients share have nothing to do with why they’re in the hospital. It has to do with who they are as people.”
Elisabeth Cook
