Rice club uses music to heal

By Minoti Kale     11/4/15 3:56am

Rice has several clubs geared toward meeting the demands of many varied student interests, but few unite those coming from backgrounds as different as the humanities and medicine. Music MDs, a music therapy-based Rice club that was founded in fall 2014, does just that. Music MD’s roots lie in Florida where the club’s founder, Duncan College junior Varun Bansal, originally started the organization in high school.  The club consists of a group of student musicians, each highly proficient in their chosen area of music, who play music for patients at Houston Methodist Hospital.

 “What we basically do is go up to patient floors and play in individual patient rooms after asking the patients if they’d like to hear some music,” Bansal said. 

The members of the organization also have to meet the Methodist volunteer requirements and are a part of the general Methodist volunteer group.

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Though club members have not gone through formal therapy training, the club operates on the basic principles of music therapy. Though a relatively new health profession, music therapy has been proven to be very effective in assisting with physical therapy, and is also a positive motivator for patients who are undergoing intense medical treatments. The music session dates are organized by the club, in conjunction with the hospital, at the beginning of each month, and members sign up for the times when they are available. Usually a group of around seven people sign up and split into smaller groups of two or three people per room. Each group then plays a short selection of pieces for the patient.

The pieces played are usually chosen by the students before they go to the hospital, based on their varying levels of experience. The repertoire covers a wide range of musical styles, though according to Bansal, it is more common for classical pieces and folk music to be requested.

“We also have to make sure that the pieces we choose aren’t too long so we don’t interfere with medical care and other hospital protocols,” Bansal said. 

Though the pieces are generally selected by the students, patients can also request to have specific pieces played beforehand. Some more spontaneous song choices include playing “Happy Birthday” for the patients as a part of hospital birthday celebrations.

“Patients in the hospital are out of their normal social  environment,” Bansal said. “What we’re trying to do is try to restore the normalcy of that environment and facilitate interaction with other people, which is something that several of these patients may miss out on.”

According to Bansal and Jones College junior Julia Zhang, the music they play essentially serves as an icebreaker for conversation. 

“It allows us to engage with the patients. Bansal said. “Many times patients enjoy talking about famous musicians they’ve seen and they often have a child or a grandchild who plays an instrument, so playing music for them really helps with generating conversation.” Having such conversations has been clinically proven to help the patients feel happier and more socially connected, which is important to the healing process.

Interacting with patients, however, isn’t always easy. According to Bansal and Zhang, students have to learn to not take rejection personally. Many of the hospital patients the students play for have been through long, difficult surgeries and are often in a lot of pain. 

“If a patient doesn’t want to hear something, you need to be understanding about that,” Bansal said. “Patients sometimes also have very strong opinions about things that you don’t necessarily agree with, but you have to be very sensitive to these feelings and ideas and must be very conciliatory in such situations.”

Despite some difficulties, both Bansal and Zhang have found the program incredibly rewarding and several students in the club have received many positive testimonials and feedback from the patients they have played for. According to Bansal, his most memorable experience with the club came from a session with a patient who had recently had open-heart surgery. “She said that she felt like with the music that was played, every note was going right into her heart to heal it,” Bansal said. “That was very touching.”

According to Zhang, the club also provides a distinctive experience for students and musicians to experience the medical environment in healthcare in a way that is very different from traditional shadowing. “It feels very involved,” Zhang said. “I think the program gives you a better idea of the empathetic side of what being a doctor would be like — interacting with them, caring for them, talking about their day and trying to help them feel better; and I feel like it is a really unique experience that you don’t really get  when you generally volunteer in the hospital.”

Though the organization started in Florida, it already has a branch in Massachusetts, in addition to this newest one through Rice. 

“We might also try to expand our Houston program to Texas Children’s Hospital as well and to other public hospitals like Memorial Hermann,” Bansal said. “But we will definitely continue with Methodist as it has been a great experience.”

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