Harp-to-heart medicine

• Article
• Comments ()
• Click-2-Listen
• Videos

By

URBANA, Ill.

When a harpist wearing blue hospital scrubsstarted playing the familiarstrainsof Pachelbel's Canon during Edith Zook's heart procedure, the scene couldn't have been more surreal.

Surrounded by cutting-edge medical equipment, the 83-year-old patient lay unconscious and sedated, with skinny electrode-equipped catheters snaking from veins in her right thigh and shoulder into her heart. They provided a conduit for a video monitor showing the squiggly waves of Mrs. Zook's irregular heartbeat.

Like some weird sci-fi melding of heaven and high-tech earth, the musician strummed serenely on her 4-foot Irish harp just a few feet away, while the patient snored and her doctor silently examined the ups and downs of rainbow-colored heart waves on the screen.

The music sounded lovely -- but it was meant to help heal, not entertain.

Mrs. Zook suffers from atrial fibrillation, a fast, irregular heartbeat caused by mixed-up electrical signals generated by the heart's upper chambers. Mrs. Zook's symptoms include unnerving palpitations and troubling fatigue that make her collapse without warning.

Her physician, Dr. Abraham Kocheril, chief of cardiac electrophysiology at the Carle Heart Center in Urbana, says he has found signs that harp music might help sick hearts like Mrs. Zook's beat more normally.

The theory is based partly on work by Dr. Ary Goldberger of Harvard Medical School showing that varied rhythms created by healthy hearts are similar to note patterns in classical music.

Dr. Kocheril's work also fits with a growing music therapy movement, whose supporters think music can alleviate some of the mental and physical symptoms of disease.

"People know that music relaxes you. We're just trying to get more medical validation," said Dr. Kocheril's harpist and co-researcher, Dr. Jennifer MacKinnon, 35, a Chicago internist. She took up harp-playing at age 10 and as a child played for patients of her father, also a physician.