Music as a treatment for anxiety and/or pain for children during painful procedures: An Integrative Review

Pain is a subjective, unpleasant sensory experience which is formed and exacerbated by previous memories of pain (International Association for the Study of Pain, 1994; Young, 2005). Personal experiences of pain, which can be caused by childhood medical procedures, can be worsened by the presence of anxiety and anxiety can lead to higher reports of pain (Goodenough et al., 1999; Whitehead-Pleaux, Baryza, & Sheridan, 2006). Pain can begin as early as a day old and if the pain goes unattended, it has been associated with lifelong effects including lower pain threshold, PTSD, medical fear, and avoidance of healthcare (Pate, Blount, Cohen, & Smith, 2010; Rennick, Johnston, Dougherty, Platt, & Ritchie, 2002; Taddio, Shah, Gilbert-MacLeod, & Katz, 2008). An integrative review was performed to examine the state of the literature on using music as a treatment for pain and anxiety in children during painful procedures. A search of CINAHL, PubMed, and EMBASE resulted in eight randomized controlled trials involving music as an intervention with a total of 596 children age 0-18 undergoing a painful procedures. In general, music was seen to be a predictor of decreasing pain and/or anxiety during painful procedures. However, due to the heterogeneous nature of the studies it was difficult to draw definitive conclusions. Future research should focus on larger sample sizes and more consistent methods to answer questions of music’s effectiveness.Bachelor of Scienc