Cancer Patients Turn to Music Therapy for Nausea Relief

Jason Kiernan knows the value of music. After studying piano, he developed a taste for bluegrass in his 20s. Now he plays banjo in a six-piece bluegrass band. In addition to picking the banjo, he's an assistant professor in the College of Nursing at Michigan State University.

A few years ago, when he was finishing his doctorate in nursing and looking around for a dissertation project, he noticed something interesting about patients receiving chemotherapy in the infusion clinic: They were, quite often, listening to music on headphones while they received their treatments. When he asked why they were listening to music rather than streaming a TV show or surfing YouTube, most replied that the Wi-Fi at the hospital wasn't great. It was just easier to listen to music. Still, Kiernan wondered if there might be a benefit to those tunes.Kiernan was aware of the evidence that music can help reduce pain, but there is much less evidence for music's effect on chemotherapy-induced nausea.

"Anti-nausea meds are expensive. I work in a big urban center where insurance is an issue, and there are people who can't afford those medications. As a nurse practitioner, I'm always interested in interventions that are low cost and easily accessible to my patients." He'd found the perfect research topic.

After hold-ups due to the pandemic — "they were not letting any unnecessary personnel anywhere near the hospital," says Kiernan — he was finally able to put together a small pilot study. Over a period of five days, 12 patients listened to their favorite music for 30 minutes each time they took their nausea medication. The patients experienced a reduction in the severity of nausea as well as in ratings of how much the nausea bothered them.

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