If you've ever come home from a bad day at work and popped your favorite CD into the stereo to feel better, you've practiced a form of music therapy.

Music makes people relax, energizes them, decreases depression, reduces pain and even helps babies gain weight, according to a recent presentation to the American Psychiatric Association's meeting in Philadelphia.

"Music therapy is really coming into its own in the medical arena. It's really gaining acceptance through research,"" says Joanne Loewy, a board-certified music therapist at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York City.

Loewy's presentation focused on how music therapy can help with pain management.

To manage chronic pain that accompanies diseases such as sickle-cell anemia, Loewy says she shows patients how to use music as a distraction. She says drumming, for instance, acts as a release.

For patients near the end of their lives, Loewy says music therapy can help people come to terms with what's happening to them. Using music and guided imagery, Loewy says she helps patients metaphorically prepare for death and eases their suffering.

Loewy says music is processed along the same neural pathways as pain and therefore is used increasingly for the pain that accompanies procedures like spinal taps. She says if a patient gets involved in music before the procedure, those pathways already are busy so the patient doesn't feel pain.

Loewy says studies also show that music can help babies gain weight faster and can change the rate of their breathing.

"Music therapy is being used in special education, Alzheimer's treatment, depression and virtually every aspect of medicine," she says.

There's no question that music therapy is growing in acceptance, says Dr. James Gordon, chairman of the White House Commission on Complementary and Alternative Medicine Policy and director of the Center for Mind-Body Medicine in Washington, D.C.

"We do a lot of work with cancer, and music is almost always included as part of therapeutic work now. But 15 to 20 years ago you rarely saw it," Gordon says. "Music is now very quickly becoming a mainstream therapy."

Music therapy shouldn't be used in place of traditional therapy, but in conjunction with it. "It's not an either-or situation," Gordon says.

(From HealthScout)