Heart Health
Therapeutic Harp Program

www.harpflutehealer.com

In March of 2000, the Heart Hospital of New Mexico began a pilot project to bring live harp music to the bedside of patients. The project was proposed by music practitioner and harpist Sue Hoadley as an intervention to reduce patient and family anxiety before and after surgery. Quiet harp music played at 60-70 beats per minute is sometimes accompanied by Hoadley's Native American flute. The positive responses pouring in from patients, as well as physicians and staff, supported continuing the program as a regular part of patient care.

The basis for the "Healing Harp Program" is supported by numerous studies pulled from Medline on the effects of music on various parameters of anxiety and stress. In another study of the effects of music on various parameters of anxiety and stress physiology, Miluk-Koasa in 1993 recorded stress indicators of blood glucose and cortisol levels as patients were told when they were scheduled for surgery. In patients who heard relaxing music, these levels decreased rapidly to a point lower than the original readings. However, cortisol and glucose levels in the "no music" group remained elevated.

At the Heart Hospital of New Mexico, the harp music can be heard in the day surgery area, in waiting rooms and in patient rooms three days a week. Although at this point information is still anecdotal, staff has observed many cases of the positive effect of the music on self-reported pain and noted many instances of decreases in heart rate and systolic blood pressure in pre- and postoperative patients during and after listening to the harp music. A formal study is being designed to measure these effects in postcatheterization patients.

The real measure of the value of the harp program however is expressed in the unsolicited, spontaneous responses from patients and families. One family member wrote, "Upon entering the Heart Hospital, such a feeling of peace comes over you and you realize that healthcare has been raised to a new dimension. Knowing that medicine has become dominated by drugs an surgery, the Heart Hospital recognizes the spiritual needs of our being and exemplifies this concern in many ways, but most emphatically with the Healing Harp which truly heals!" And a patient wrote, "Although you were able to lower my heart rate, you did much more. Through your music, I was able to close my eyes and relax enough to get my approaching panic under control. With the boost you gave me, I was able to hang on until a pacemaker was installed."