Zekel Healthcare - How an iPod Can Fight Alzheimer’s and Dementia. The concept is elegantly simple: Provide a dementia sufferer with an MP3 player that has been loaded with music tailored to their taste. Let them listen. Ask them about it.As a researcher, I spend my time exploring life beyond adulthood. I am often dismayed at the many ways in which we medicalize a natural phenomenon that affects us all—aging. Perhaps there is no better example of this than the way in which we treat our elders living with dementia. In the United States today, some 1.5 million old people have been institutionalized for medical problems. About 80 percent of those have been segregated from the general population because they are living with Alzheimer’s disease or some other form of dementia.
Patients tucked away from sight, they are often treated with powerful psychotropic drugs. The treatment is not aimed at curing a disease, but at making the patient more malleable and manageable at the cost of hundreds of millions of dollars annually for drugs that provide limited relief and often cause significant side effects.Yet there is mounting evidence that non-pharmacological interventions for dementia, including use of dietary supplements, access to companion animals, art therapy, and memory training, provide meaningful benefits without the cost or the dangers. The power of music may be understood at some level because implicit memories are relatively well preserved in people living with dementia. Implicit memory is the kind associated with routines and repetitive activities. We tend to listen to music we like over and over and since Alzheimer's impacts the ability to form new memories, music we once loved remains accessible in the brain.
Music is far more complex than I can discern. But we know it employs everything from our emotions, to coordination, to visual memory and parts of our brain that resource rhythm, melody, lyrics and harmony. Music, it appears, stimulates many parts of the brain simultaneously. Perhaps that's why it can calm, improve mood, increase socialization, bring back memories, and almost instantaneously bring to life the whole person. Foremost among these exciting and promising techniques is the use of personalized music. The concept is elegantly simple: Provide a dementia, alzheimer sufferer with an MP3 player that has been loaded with music tailored to their taste. Let them listen. Ask them about it. The benefits of this powerful intervention, which has no side effects and little cost, include better memory, improved mood, decreased pain, increased involvement in the world and, most importantly, enhanced well-being.
We have learned that music uses a side door into a part of the mind that is relatively undamaged by dementia. Patients can listen to and even perform music in ways that are undiminished, even after they have forgotten the names of loved ones. We process music with almost every part of our brains and music with personal meaning can promote extremely strong responses. Clinical studies demonstrate that it is possible for personalized music to have a greater effect than medication and that it can even trigger long-term memories.There is currently no drug on the market that can help a person reconnect with their vital essence the way music will. Yet this extremely effective and inexpensive alternative is not in widespread use in nursing homes, in part because it is not covered by medical insurance.Using the most ordinary of means a personal music player and a handful of digital music files people who have not spoken in years begin to sing along with the music of their youth. Music therapy is a powerful, non-invasive, and non-pharmacological medium capable of unique outcomes. It is accessible to all and can be used with individuals, groups, or families. Need no prior music training to receive services but benefit by active engagement in the therapeutic process that may include creating, learning, listening to, or performing music.
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