Music interventions and pain: An integrative review and analysis of recent literature

Abstract

Music interventions offer a low-cost, low-risk adjuvant to traditional therapies. However, scarce physiological evidence exists to explain how music relieves pain. In this integrative review, we provide a summary of results in the recent literature regarding music-induced analgesia and provide a critical analysis of methodological patterns. We then describe the need for robust theoretical explanations that could account for the observed effects of music on pain. We completed a broad electronic search using common search engines to identify recent experiments and literature reviews that represented the current understanding of potential causal relationships between music and pain. Thirty-one articles were synthesised in this review – 23 were individual experiments and eight were literature reviews. The results show that music-induced analgesia is a consistently observable phenomenon in clinical settings, although a minority of articles report inconclusive results. The magnitude of pain relief is small to modest and results become less conclusive when derived from indirect measures of pain. Limitations of the recent literature revolve around operational definitions of pain, varieties of pain examined within articles, over-reliance on self-reporting scales, rigour in demographic reporting, diversity and size of samples and weak experimental designs. Theoretical explanations for the effect of music on pain are varied but undeveloped and lacking in physiological evidence. We conclude that music-induced analgesia is a persistently observable phenomenon. To advance the field of study, more rigorous methodological practices need to be applied and more attention needs to be focused on finding underlying physiological mechanisms for the relationships between music and pain.