This week's dose of dopamine is here! 🎶Read on to be inspired by our music theme this May..

It’s official – music therapy works!🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶🎶

We all know it feels great to listen to a good tune but just HOW good is it for us and can “music therapy” actually be taken seriously?

Music therapy may be thought of as pretty light weight stuff in terms of the huge issues which face our communities such as drug addiction, crime and disease. Yet, the proof has been published this month in an article in Scientific Reports. Wouldn’t this title make an awesome lyric: “Musical auditory stimulus acutely influences heart rate dynamic responses to medication in subjects with well-controlled hypertension”. Love it! The authors include Eli Carlos Martiniano and Milana Drumond Ramos Santana and the report can he read here https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-19418-7. This is official scientific evidence that music can have a physical impact on the body for treatment purposes. Albert Einstein said:

“If I were not a physicist, I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.”

It’s clear that music and science are so much closer than we ever dreamed to imagine.

We all know someone who has suffered from anxiety/depression, other mental health issues or addiction (which are now increasingly becoming seen as physical problems). There are wonderful organisations out there helping with addiction such as https://www.ukat.co.uk/music-therapy/
...now that’s dope!

Even hospitals are using music therapy, like the US's Northwestern Medicine Lake Forest Hospital now offering this clinically based therapy. Talk about state of the art! … now that’s super dope!

But tackling crime? Surely not? Well, look at Rehabilitation Through the Arts https://www.rta-arts.org/ and the wonderful story this month of Evan Fry who was an inmate at Westmorland Institution, a minimum security prison in a village in New Brunswick who turned his life around with a rented guitar!
...now that’s super duper dope!

So Bob Marley was on the right lines when he said:

“One good thing about music, when it hits you, you feel no pain”,

...except of course, there are a MILLION good things about music, including Bob himself!

Well, I’m off to have a cuppa with a few tunes in memory of said Bob, to round off this wonderful exploration, which I have thoroughly enjoyed! Me’s full of love for the human race and if I ever find myself forgetting, I will just chuck on a tune and feel the music work on all that ails me!

And next time you’re listening to a banging tune remember it’s probably the very best thing you can do for yourself!

If you have any wonderful examples of how music helps serious problems in your community, or how it helps you and your loved ones, I’d love to hear from you!

Peace and Love 😍🎶