Making beautiful music

Musicians, by nature of the beast, are a breed all their own.

The true artists among them are passionate to a fault about the music they make, waking in the middle of the night to write down a phrase they heard in a dream. Then come hours of piecing together the instrumentals, developing the hook and finding a word that rhymes with “orange.”

If they’re struggling to get their music heard, they’re spending weekends playing the local bars; if they’ve enjoyed some success, they’re leaving families behind as they hit the road, making enough to fund the recording they hope will put them over the top.

And you know what? While research shows that the fruits of their labors send our physical and mental health into celebration mode, making music does even more for them! That’s why it is so important for them to realize the benefits of chiropractic care, countering the physical demands of their chosen path.

• Music lowers our cortisol and increases our dopamine, the feel-good brain chemical; musicians get all that and develop a larger corpus callosum, the band of fibers that allow our brain’s hemispheres to talk back and forth. Research conducted at the Auditory Neuroscience Laboratory at Northwestern University found our auditory brain-stem automatically translates music sound waves into correlating brain waves, influencing a myriad of physical and mental functions. As neuroscientist and Northwestern professor of neurobiology Nina Kraus explains it, humans and songbirds are the only creatures that automatically respond to music, from tapping feet to the beat of their heart.

• If that sounds similar to what you experience when you visit your doctor of chiropractic, there’s good reason. While music isn’t going to end chronic pain, it’s known to fight depression, increase immunity, and lower your heart rate and blood pressure. Doctors of chiropractic tap into that, piping mood-brightening music into their offices to relax their patients before care. You may experience its effects without even consciously listening to the music.

• Think for a moment of the last time you caught someone in concert. Chances are they were wrapped around their guitar, their head hanging low, their hands claw-like in their hold on the strings. It’s a recipe for the repetitive strain injury that makes fingers go numb and arms feel like a pin cushion. By overworking certain muscles through hours of practice and performing – and leaving others to wither on the vine – the strain takes its toll on their upper body and neck, wrists, fingers and spine. By adjusting the extremities as well as the spine, doctors of chiropractic not only treat the symptoms but strengthen the spine’s relation to the body’s nervous system… and that’s beautiful music to all of us!