Ode to Healing Music in Health Care

Music therapy has been around since the 1940s when physicians notice a positive effect that music had on the soldiers with "shell shock" (now more commonly known as posttraumatic stress disorder). For decades, veterans were the primary patients worked with by music therapists. In the 1970s, the hospice movement started to enter the health care continuum, largely due to Dr Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, who advocated for home care and patient choice for the terminally ill. Two decades later, it became apparent that hospice patients could benefit from music. And currently, there are not enough people certified to work with music in hospice patients, veterans, or patients with dementia/Alzheimer's disease. No, music does not prolong life, but it does add life to the time left.