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PATIENTS RECOVERING from heart surgery who were given music to listen to through headphones while they were still asleep and on ventilators, spent about three and a half hours less in an American intensive care unit (ICU) than patients receiving normal post-operative care, according to recent research.

“The music-listening patients also reduced their sedative medication by 10 per cent,” said Dr Fred Schwartz, anaesthesiologist at the Piedmont Hospital, Atlanta, Georgia, who presented the study, Music and the Heart, at the first meeting of the International Association for Music and Medicine at University of Limerick at the weekend.