A Trusted Source: Bringing Calm Healing Music to Comfort Care Patients
Trust is not something you ask for, it is something you earn over time. For more than forty years as a pharmacist, I earned the trust of thousands of patients, one prescription at a time. That experience shaped the idea behind Acoustic Healing, long before the company had a name.
I was hired as a guitarist to record calming music for a hospital's own patient channel. One day last week, two hospital staff members shared feedback about that channel without being asked. An ICU nurse said it has become a tool she uses for several of her patients. A nurse on the oncology floor said she has been using it for comfort care patients.
That kind of feedback matters. It means recorded, professionally made music delivered through a hospital's existing closed circuit television can become a real part of patient care, not just an idea. Still, nothing compares to a live musician at the bedside. A live musician can watch how a patient responds in real time, a change in breathing, a hand relaxing, and adjust the music to meet that moment, something no recording can do. That is exactly why the hope, as Acoustic Healing grows, is to create real opportunities for live therapeutic musicians alongside the recorded music already reaching patients. That same day, a woman moving slowly with her cane found me playing in a hospital hallway. Her husband was in his room at the very end of the hall, and the music had traveled that whole distance to reach them, proof of exactly the kind of reach a live musician can have.
Recorded calming music reaching patients through a screen, and live music reaching a woman all the way down a hospital hallway, arrived as proof on the very same day, both forms of music making a real, healthy difference for the people they reached. Acoustic Healing was born from validating feedback like this, the recorded content proving that calming music belongs in patient care. The hope is to provide limited funding to help begin a pilot program with a live certified therapeutic musician, building toward that live presence at the bedside.
David Villareal, RPh, CCM
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