What happens to the Body During Music Therapy?

Music’s therapeutic qualities are impressive and far reaching.  In pain management, music provides distraction and cognitive imagery to aide relaxation.  It also reduces pain perception by blocking pain impulses to the brain at the spinal cord and releasing endorphins, which make us feel good.  Therapeutic music can also help restore lost abilities, such as memory deficits in dementia, or speech and motor deficits following a brain injury or stroke.  One of the fastest growing clinical applications of music therapy is with children with autism spectrum or other developmental disorders, helping improve self-expression, as well as social and shared communication, and perhaps reaching even less measurable goals such as improving self-esteem and quality of life.  

At Children's Music Fund (CMF), we ask parents of children we serve to monitor many different aspects of their child’s functioning and their presenting symptoms before and after a 16-session cycle of CMF funded music therapy.  Parents have told us that after their work with our music therapists, they have noticed improvements in their child’s communication skills, an increase in their general happiness and life satisfaction, an improvement (decrease in) loneliness and boredom, and a decrease in symptoms of pain and anxiety.   

Seeing is believing... Joesph and CMF music therapist Melinda - show us huge smiles after their session.

If you know of a child with a chronic condition or life-altering illness, applications for individual can be found on our website: www.thecmf.org

for more information contact 310-428-0589 or email info@thecmf.org