Hospitals are using harpists to calm patients on the operating table after the study revealed that the instrument alleviated pain. The sound and vibrations have also been shown to reduce the heart rate, decrease blood pressure and combat heart disease.
Hospitals are using harpists to calm patients on the operating table after the study revealed that the instrument alleviated pain. The sound and vibrations have also been shown to reduce the heart rate, decrease blood pressure and combat heart disease.
Several private hospices and care homes already employ harpists and the National Health Service is following suit with the Royal Brompton Hospital, in London, and Cardiff’s Velindre Cancer Centre looking set to become the first trusts to take on players.
Study conducted in the US discovered that the range of vibrations emitted by the plucked strings affect the body’s nervous system and some American surgeons employ harpists so that patients need less anaesthetic. Anne Mills, the head of nursing and therapies at the Velindre Hospital, said that using a harpist during chemotherapy and radiotherapy could mean that a patient needed fewer pain relievers.
The hospital has recruited 26-year-old Bethan Hughes, to play to patients during the therapy. Miss Hughes, a harpist from the age of 10, said: “The harp can be a medicine. It works differently to other instruments. It can help to alter brain patterns and brain waves, slow heart rates and increase oxygenation in the blood. Within 10 minutes of music being played, the patient’s blood pressure can change.”
The Royal Brompton hopes to employ Liehsja Blaxland-de Lange, also 26, to perform for its patients. Miss Blaxland-de Lange, who has been playing the harp for 17 years, said: “I will perform to patients before and after they have surgery and - depending on the surgeon and the patient - possibly in surgery itself.”
The US study has been conducted by Dr Abraham Kocheril, the chief of cardiac electrophysiology at the Carle Heart Centre, in Illinois. He said: “The harp seems to affect the part of the nervous system which regulates the heart. It relaxes the patient and the heart slows down. “People are not seeing this as some sort of voodoo any more. There’s a sound scientific basis for it. What hasn’t yet been done is to figure out why the harp works in this way but that is what we are trying to do.”
Christina Tourin, a California harpist who visits Britain to teach “harp therapy”, said: “I have played in surgery, including while a woman had a lump removed from her breast. She needed hardly any anaesthetic.”
