When Christine Stevens traveled to Iraq to help people with her music, she found herself in a hospital, surrounded by sick, sobbing children with only a hand-held drum and a flute.
Luckily, that was all she needed to make a difference in their lives.
Stevens, an author, music therapist, and founder of UpBeat Drum Circles, is a major proponent of using drumming for its healing benefits. She will hold an experiential drumming program in UCLA’s Semel Institute for Neuroscience on March 10.
Stevens saw the power that music has to lift spirits first-hand when she approached a crying boy on a hospital bed during her trip to Iraq.
“The little boy stopped crying and started tapping the drum,” Stevens said. “I started playing my flute and we started communicating. The kid was really into the rhythm.”
The amount of scientific research being done on music’s healing power is growing.
According to a study published in the journal Alternative Therapies in Health and Medicine, drumming helps increase the number of subjects’ natural killer cells, which fight virus infections and boost the immune system.
Another study done on “burned-out” college students found that one week of group drumming dramatically reduced stress levels and improved mood states, Stevens said.
She added that humans are naturally equipped for drumming due to such rhythmic aspects of life as the heartbeat and the sleep-wake cycle of each day.
“We’re biologically wired for rhythm,” she said. “Drumming benefits body, mind, and spirit.”
A number of UCLA students have also felt the beneficial effects of the activity.
Jake Jamieson has been drumming for the past six years and said he notices a significant shift in mood once he starts playing.
“Drums have always been a stress reliever,” the second-year ethnomusicology student said. “I let out anger, sorrow, frustration ““ I go into a completely different head space.”
Tracy Tung, a third-year music student, said she has played the piano since she was five and recently started playing the drums with an ensemble.
“Drums are more freeing,” Tung said. “You maintain one beat over and over. It has a calming effect.”
A growing number of music and medicine experts have started to recognize the health benefits linked to the arts and drumming in particular.
Ping Ho, the director of educational outreach for UCLA’s Pediatric Pain Program, founded UCLArts and Healing in 2004 to sponsor events linking the arts to therapeutic contexts.
“There’s a diminishing presence of the arts in medical education,” she said. “It’s a technique that can really humanize medicine.”
Ho said that her center’s programs offer opportunities to engage in art forms from creative writing to theater that are intended to be therapeutic.
“The arts work on the right part of the brain,” Ho said. “It’s intuitive. It’s spontaneous. It’s an alternative to psychotherapy.”
Music therapy may even be an alternative to many small medical processes, said Raffi Tachdjian, a pediatric fellow in the division of allergy and immunology at UCLA.
Tachdjian, who started the Children’s Music Fund, a nonprofit organization that brings musical instruments and therapy to children with life-altering illnesses, said music could be used in place of a number of conscious sedation procedures that frequently induce adverse patient responses.
“There would be less use of medication and a less costly environment,” he said. “It’s good both ways.”
Tachdjian also noted that he has personally seen the positive effects of music, mainly the lifting of patients’ spirits.
“Good thoughts, to me, equal good immune cells and good messages throughout the body,” he said.
In spite of increased education about music’s health benefits, Ho said that there has been somewhat of a lack of students at her center’s events thus far.
But Michelle Mahanian, a third-year neuroscience student, said that student interest is there as long as the programs are better advertised. Mahanian is founder of Music to Heal, a student group where artists perform in nursing homes and hospitals
“I think there would be a high demand among the undergraduate community,” Mahanian said. “They’re going to attract more students once they’re more established.”
Tachdjian said that he thought that the therapeutic effects of music would soon catch on, comparing it to yoga and acupuncture, which have seen spikes in participation despite years of disbelief.
While music therapy has strong benefits on an individual level, it can also have value for a community, Stevens said.
She recalled a drum circle on her trip to Iraq comprised of a number of different ethnic and religious groups.
“People came there as Muslims or Christians and they left as drummers in one band,” Stevens said. “A man told me, “˜You have helped us remember our own history.'”