Is "music therapy" effective?

A novel approach to wellness known as "music therapy" has recently gained popularity on social media among the post-2000s generation. The musical therapy means using music to regulate emotions, behavior, and physiological conditions.

The ancient Chinese medical text, Huangdi Neijing (literally the Inner Canon of the Yellow Emperor), proposed the Five-Tune Therapy theory over two thousand years ago. Today, numerous hospitals have established music clinics. In 2011, the Nanjing Integrated Chinese and Western Medicine Hospital launched a music clinic in east China.

"People of all age groups are currently seeking treatment, ranging from the youngest at 10 to the oldest at 82. The majority are adolescents and middle-aged individuals," explained Dr. Li Jing, deputy chief physician of the preventive treatment department at the Nanjing-based hospital.

Li said the principles behind musical therapy are the traditional Chinese theory of Yin-Yang and five elements. The therapy categorizes music into the Yin/light pieces and the Yang/heavy ones, or into tunes of the five elements in nature, namely wood, fire, earth, metal and water. Personalized musical prescriptions are tailored based on the patients' constitution, emotions, condition, and preferences.

Li Jing shared a successful case of a young white-collar worker she treated earlier. This 25-year-old lady struggled with her relationship with superiors, suffering from experienced high stress, loss of appetite, insomnia, irritability, and other illnesses.

"At that time, I recommended three types of music for her. From the perspective of traditional Chinese medicine, she carried heavy emotional burdens and liver-qi stagnation. I advised her to listen to the melodic/'wooden' music to soothe her qi/gloom in liver, while blue/'metal' music was suggested to control her anger. Before bedtime, I gave her 15 minutes of gentle/'watery’ music to calm her mind and improve sleep."

After about a month, the lady’s sleep and digestion were significantly improved. Li emphasized: "Prior to prescribing her music, it's crucial to identify the root causes and provide psychological guidance. This process requires long time."

Li underscored that music therapy excels in helping patients regulate emotions, enhance sleep, alleviate stress from cognitive work, and it also helps in recovering from hypertension, strokes and other chronic conditions. However, music therapy is far from enough in curing serious diseases. Seeking medical attention in time is still necessary.

Read More：
The zangfu are the collective name of eleven entities (similar to organs) that constitute the centre piece of TCM's systematization of bodily functions. The term zang refers to the five considered to be yin in nature—Heart, Liver, Spleen, Lung, Kidney—while fu refers to the six associated with yang—Small Intestine, Large Intestine, Gallbladder, Urinary Bladder, Stomach and San Jiao. Despite having the names of organs, they are only loosely tied to (rudimentary) anatomical assumptions. Instead, they are primarily understood to be certain "functions" of the body. To highlight the fact that they are not equivalent to anatomical organs, their names are usually capitalized.

Each zàng is paired with a fǔ, and each zàng-fǔ pair is assigned to one of five elemental qualities (i.e., the Five Elements or Five Phases). These correspondences are stipulated as:

Fire = Heart and Small Intestine and Pericardium
Earth = Spleen and Stomach
Metal = Lung and Large Intestine
Water = Kidney and Bladder
Wood = Liver and Gallbladder

The zàng-fǔ are also connected to the twelve standard meridians – each yang meridian is attached to a fǔ organ, and five of the yin meridians are attached to a zàng. As there are only five zàng but six yin meridians, the sixth is assigned to the Pericardium, a peculiar entity almost similar to the Heart zàng.

Source: Yangtse Evening Post; trans-editing by Guo Yao