Scott Clair/Special to ETC

Erin Melton, left, and Karla Mramor are music therapists at Avow Hospice.

STORY TOOLS

• E-mail story
• Comments
• iPod friendly
• Printer friendly

More Local News

• 30 years: Ago in the Eagle...
• History in Motion - Oct. 14, 2008
• Women, Wisdom & Wealth: Past, present and future

Share and Enjoy [?]

Erin Melton is making a house call. The Avow Hospice therapist enters the East Naples home. She is greeted by her patient’s family members and asks if there’s been any developments since the last time she visited. Melton is told her patient has taken a turn for the worse, that he is mostly unresponsive.

Her patient, Tom, is in the living room. The Alzheimer’s disease that has afflicted him for the last decade has atrophied Tom’s brain to the point where he is mostly uncommunicative. Melton quickly assesses her patient. On this particular day Tom flashes between total detachment and acute agitation. She reaches into her black therapist’s bag and pulls out … a guitar.

She begins performing a Tony Bennett number. The song moves through the disease like a hot coal on ice and lights a place within Tom the Alzheimer’s cannot reach. He begins to hum along then reaches out his hand — a gentleman asking a lady to dance.

Melton and Tom do a nifty two-step.

Tom is smiling. Melton is smiling. Tom’s family watches in enjoyment, forgetting their weariness. The music does something a scalpel or pill cannot — it relieves, if just for a moment, the daily trauma experienced by the ailing and their families so common in the late-stages of Alzheimer’s.

Within a few weeks of Melton’s visit the Alzheimer’s will claim Tom’s life. But through Melton and her supervisor at Avow, Karla Mramor, the music will play on.

Mramor and Melton are music therapists, which is not some new-age treatment but has been practiced around the world for centuries in one form or another. In the United States, the field of music therapy began to develop after World War I and World War II when community musicians performed in Veteran’s hospitals around the country for soldiers who had suffered physical and emotional trauma from the wars.

Doctors noted the positive responses the veterans had to the music and how it influenced the rehabilitation process. Soon thereafter, physicians began to recognize that musicians would require medical and therapeutic training before performing for ailing patients. Out of that need resulted the nation’s first music therapy degree program, founded at Michigan State University in 1944. There are now thousands of such programs in universities across the world, which provide students with training in anatomy, psychology, acoustics, sociology, while also requiring a basic proficiency in many musical disciplines.

Avow’s president and CEO, Karen Rollins, began looking to create a music therapy program for the facility in 2005 after learning about the field at an industry conference.

“I heard music therapists discuss how much they were able to help patients in a hospice setting,” Rollins said. “I learned that it’s not just somebody playing music. It’s a skilled, schooled therapist. We all have feelings that are evoked by music, but somebody needs to know what to do with them.”

With more than 24 years in the field, Mramor was chosen to head the Complementary Therapies program at Avow, of which music therapy is a part.

“The program was received enthusiastically by our patients from the start,” said Mramor, who earned a degree in music therapy from Baldwin-Wallace College in Ohio. “Quickly, I had a caseload of more than 60 patients. The response was amazing. I remember feeling so overwhelmed.”

Melton, a recent graduate of Appalachian State University in North Carolina, was hired in February. Like Mramor, she also received her degree in music therapy. Each currently has a caseload of 20 patients or so that they visit weekly at various locations, such as homes, assisted-living centers and nursing homes.

Because of Naples’ particular demographic, most of Avow’s patients that Mramor and Melton treat are elderly and suffer from forms of dementia or cancer, generally. However, music therapy has shown to be effective for patients of all ages and ailments. Many hospitals apply music therapy in their neonatal intensive care units and brain injury rehabilitation centers.

With the help of grants received from the Saldukas Family Foundation, Avow’s music therapy program now has a full complement of instruments with which to share with its patients. Typical therapy session goals for Melton and Mramor are to provide their patients with increased opportunity for self expression, relaxation, develop communication abilities and to be a comforting presence.

There is also something beneficial patients find about the live aspect of the music rather than the playing of a recording. “When I’m there with my music, there is an immediate response,” Melton said. “They’re not responding so much to the sound as they are the presence.”

According to Mramor, more than any other art form, people have an innate connection to music. It can create moods and bring back memories that can bring about a deeper understanding about themselves and their lives. It also has medical implications.

“We respond physiologically to music,” Mramor said. “Our respiration, blood pressure and immune response improves with its presence. Music is a healing power.”

To make a contribution to Avow Hospice’s music therapy program, contact the facility at 261-4404.