[Music therapy and internal medicine]

Since December 1988 the district hospital of the Oberwallis hosts the 4 year project "Music-Therapy in Internal Medicine" under the scientific guidance of Dr. H. H. Decker-Voigt, director of the Institute of music therapy of the musical academy Hamburg. This therapy can be described as a form of psychotherapy which uses the medium music with its particularities as an adjunct for treatment. The different levels of action of music, a functional and a regressive one and their respective importance for music therapy are described first. An introduction to the two forms of music therapy, the receptive and the active with their respective particularities follows. Indications for music therapy are by large not disease-specific but depend on the assessment of the importance of psychic components in somatic disease. Coping with disease, psychosocial integration and promotion of positive resources or self-healing potential are regarded as indications for music therapy. Music therapy is not indicated when the patient is not motivated or his stay at the hospital is shorter than 2 weeks. We offer a music therapy to all patients in whose illness, according to our evaluation, emotional and psychic factors play an important role and to those patients with functional disorders on whom we would like to learn more by the psychoanalytic possibilities of music therapy. According to our experience music therapy is well suited as an adjunct in many diseases in internal medicine and represents an enrichment of our therapeutic possibilities.