Music Is Medicine: What Emerging Neuroscience Is Teaching Us About Healing
- 6 days ago
- 4 min read
"Where words fail, music speaks."— Hans Christian Andersen
As a medical doctor, there has always been a part of me that felt slightly uncomfortable calling music medicine.
Medicine, after all, is something we prescribe. A tablet. An injection. A surgical intervention. Something measured in milligrams rather than melodies.
Yet another part of me was fascinated by the idea.
Working with Neurodynamic Breathwork®, I have watched music profoundly change people's emotional state, breathing, physiology and nervous system. Time and again I have witnessed people move from anxiety into calm, from emotional suppression into expression, from mental busyness into deep presence. I was never in doubt that music was doing something important.
I just wasn't sure modern medicine was ready to describe it as medicine.
Recently I discovered the work of Dr. Mei Rui.
For the first time, I saw someone asking exactly the questions I had been asking—but doing so within one of the world's leading cancer centres: MD Anderson Cancer Center in Texas.
It made me pause.
If one of the world's most respected medical institutions is investigating music with the same scientific rigour used to evaluate drugs and surgical interventions, perhaps medicine has finally caught up with something humanity has intuitively known for thousands of years.
The Wisdom We Forgot
Long before MRI scanners, cortisol measurements and inflammatory biomarkers, every culture understood the power of music.
Music has accompanied birth, death, celebration, grief, prayer and healing throughout human history.
For thousands of years it was never viewed simply as entertainment. It was medicine for the mind, the body and the spirit.
Somewhere during the rise of modern medicine, music became categorised as something pleasant rather than therapeutic—an optional extra rather than an essential part of healing.
Today, neuroscience is beginning to close that gap.
Dr. Mei Rui's Vision: Making Music Measurable
Dr. Mei Rui leads the Music-in-Medicine Initiative at MD Anderson Cancer Center. Rather than asking whether people simply enjoy music, her research asks a far more important question:
Can music produce measurable biological changes?
To answer that question, her team is using some of the most sophisticated tools available in modern medicine.
Their current Music-STAR clinical trial is investigating whether carefully designed live and recorded music interventions can reduce stress before neurosurgery in cancer patients. Researchers are measuring not only anxiety and pain, but also heart rate, blood pressure, cortisol levels, inflammatory biomarkers, proteomics and metabolomics—looking for objective biological evidence that music influences the healing process.
This represents a remarkable shift.
Music is no longer being viewed merely as emotional support.
It is being investigated as a measurable biomedical intervention.
Looking Inside the Brain
Dr. Rui has also led pioneering research involving practising surgeons—one of the most chronically stressed professional groups in healthcare.
Using ultra-high-resolution 7-Tesla functional MRI, heart rate variability, wearable sleep monitoring and burnout assessments, her team explored how six weeks of listening to prescribed or self-selected music influenced brain function and wellbeing.
Although this was a small pilot study and many findings were preliminary, the research demonstrated something profoundly important: it is now possible to objectively study how music influences brain connectivity, physiological stress and emotional regulation using modern neuroscience tools.
For decades we have known that music changes how we feel.
Now we are beginning to understand how it changes what is happening inside our brains and bodies.
Music Changes Biology
One of the most exciting aspects of this emerging field is that music appears to influence many of the systems we now recognise as central to health.
Research increasingly suggests that music can influence:
stress hormone regulation, including cortisol
heart rate variability, an important marker of autonomic nervous system balance
emotional processing
sleep quality
functional brain connectivity
inflammatory pathways
While much of this research is still developing and many findings remain preliminary, the direction is unmistakable: music does not simply change our mood—it changes physiology.
Two Medicines
This research resonates deeply with what I experience every week in Neurodynamic Breathwork®.
When people first hear about breathwork, they understandably focus on the breathing.
But I increasingly think of Neurodynamic Breathwork® as working with two medicines:
The breath.
And the music.
The breath changes physiology directly.
Music helps guide the journey.
It regulates the nervous system, supports emotional processing, creates psychological safety and accompanies different phases of the experience. Carefully selected music is not simply playing in the background—it actively shapes the experience.
For years, this was something experienced breathwork facilitators observed clinically.
Emerging neuroscience is now beginning to explain why.
Beyond Entertainment
Perhaps one of the greatest misunderstandings about music is that we think of it primarily as entertainment.
Of course music entertains us.
But it also comforts us.
It helps us grieve.
It regulates infants before they understand language.
It calms people living with dementia when memory itself begins to fade.
It accompanies us through weddings, funerals and almost every important transition in life.
Music has always interacted with our nervous systems.
Modern science is finally giving us the tools to understand how.
A New Era of Medicine
Medicine has always evolved as our ability to measure improves.
There was a time when we could not measure blood pressure.
Then blood sugar.
Then inflammatory markers.
Then brain connectivity.
Perhaps music has not suddenly become medicine.
Perhaps we have simply developed instruments sensitive enough to detect what it has been doing all along.
Final Thoughts
What excites me most about Dr. Mei Rui's work is not simply that music may reduce stress or alter biomarkers.
It is that medicine is beginning to recognise something ancient.
Healing is not always found inside a bottle.
Sometimes it begins with a conversation.
Sometimes with a compassionate presence.
Sometimes with a breath.
And sometimes…
It begins with a piece of music.
References
Rui M. Music-STAR Trial. MD Anderson Cancer Center.
ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT06536504.
Rui M et al. Impact of Prescribed and Self-Selected Music Interventions on Stress, Sleep, Heart Rate Variability, and Brain Connectivity in Surgeons Using 7-Tesla Functional MRI and Wearable Actigraphy. JMIR Formative Research. 2026.
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