Musical Mindfulness for Pain in the ED Waiting Room

Studies have shown that 60-70% of patients in the Emergency Department (ED) experience pain. With pain being such a broad issue in the ED, the ED is expected to deliver safe and effective treatment of pain. However, with the current ongoing opioid epidemic, it is important to consider other methods, both pharmacologic and nonpharmacologic, of pain reduction. Jazz music specifically has been demonstrated to have therapeutic effects on pain that can be used to lower the quantity of opioids administered to patients. Non-pharmacological interventions in the emergency department for pain typically consist of splinting an injury, applying heat or cold, or various distractions following initial and sequential pain assessment. Pharmacological interventions for pain in the Emergency Department involve the administration of acetaminophen, muscle relaxers, topical anesthetics, opioids, to name a few. In the emergency department (ED), providers are increasingly hesitant to prescribe opioids over the past decade due to the current opioid epidemic, in which there is an increasing proportion of people that develop an addiction to opioids, including those that are prescribed to them for pain management.. While emergency medicine providers' decrease in opioid prescriptions pertains to their implementation of opioid-prescribing policies, little evidence has been found demonstrating a direct link in these policies to decreases in substance misuse. Consequently, providers find themselves needing to become ingenious in their approach to pain in patients through the integration of pharmacologic and non-pharmacologic mediums of analgesia. A recent randomized controlled trial (RCT) from Brigham and Women's Hospital in Boston sought to identify the qualitative responses from patients in the ED following the arbitrary distribution of either supervised or unsupervised music therapy over a time period of 4 hours. The initial results found that, generally speaking, music therapy may lower re