Doctors Raise a Patient from a Deathlike State with Electronic Music
Is ultrasound the healing song of the 21st century?
Years ago, I met several surgeons who used ultrasound to treat cataracts. The technique had been developed by a jazz saxophonist named Charles Kelman. I even scrubbed up and went into surgery to watch how it worked.
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Kelman got rich from his innovation. Surgeons all over the world started using his ultrasound device—called the phacoemulsifier.
People laugh when I describe it as a musical instrument. But that’s a legit view. When you use an instrument to create ordered sounds with purpose, you are entering the traditional territory of music.
And I’m never surprised when sound demonstrates its powerful effects on our bodies and psyches—because I’ve seen it happen firsthand as a musician.
You won’t read about this in Rolling Stone, but maybe you should. That’s because ultrasound is now used everywhere from removing kidney stones—there’s a real rolling of stones for you—to treating wounds. My dental hygienist even uses ultrasound nowadays to clean my teeth.
Some of these applications are extraordinary, even bordering on the miraculous.
Consider, for example, the use of ultrasound to revive patients in deep deathlike comas.
The first use of this amazing technique happened at UCLA Medical Center in 2016.
“Doctors literally raised a patient from a death-like state with this electronic music.”
A 25-year-old man was in a deep coma, and doctors were faced with a difficult decision. They considered a highly invasive operation to implant electrodes inside the thalamus of his brain—with the goal of jolting him awake. But this was risky and might not even work.
So they tried something strange and different instead. They played some new high tech healing music for 10 minutes. At least that’s how I describe it.
Here’s how the scientists explain the procedure:
That device, about the size of a coffee cup saucer, creates a small sphere of acoustic energy that can be aimed at different regions of the brain to excite brain tissue. For the new study, researchers placed it by the side of the man’s head and activated it 10 times for 30 seconds each, in a 10-minute period.
And what were the results?
Before the procedure began, the man showed only minimal signs of being conscious and of understanding speech — for example, he could perform small, limited movements when asked. By the day after the treatment, his responses had improved measurably. Three days later, the patient had regained full consciousness and full language comprehension
You can do that with just ten minutes of sound?
Doctors literally raised a patient from a deathlike state with electronic music. And here’s the instrument that performed this miraculous resuscitation.
“It is possible that we were just very lucky,” one doctor explained.
But then they tried it again. The same research team announced two more successes in 2021.
A man had been in a minimally conscious state for 14 months before the procedure—but after the second treatment (of just 10 minutes of ultrasound) he could communicate verbally again.
The second case was even more extreme—a woman had been in a coma for two-and-a-half years. But after just one ultrasound treatment, she could recognize objects—something she hadn’t done in years.
What else can ultrasound treat? How about cancer?
The FDA recently approved the use of ultrasound in treating tumors in liver cancer patients—a procedure known as histotripsy. A study launched in 2021 had promising results, and now this technique can be used widely.
There are many reasons to cheer on these developments. But doctors are especially excited by how easy it is to use sound to heal—these procedures are minimally invasive, with no obvious risks or side effects.
In fact, a tumor can be destroyed in as little as seven minutes with sound.
An article about a University of Michigan research project explains:
What that could mean for patients is treatment without the physical toll of radiation or chemotherapy, fewer concerns with drug compatibility, far shorter recovery times than with surgery and less treatment discomfort.
This is possible because it is much easier to ensure that histotripsy treatments are hitting the tumor, and not healthy tissue, compared to radiation or invasive procedures
Ultrasound is also getting used now to treat chronic pain, addiction, and depression, among other disorders. If you dig into the details of these studies, you soon learn that sound is like a miracle drug—even better than Ozempic—but without any pharmaceuticals required.
Yet I never hear music scholars discuss this research. As far as I can tell, they’re totally unaware of it. I sometimes think I’m the only music writer who cares about this stuff.
But if sound waves above 20,000 kilohertz have positive effects on our body, what about sounds at lower frequencies? There’s plenty of evidence from shamanic literature that low tones also have healing properties—but medical researchers don’t pay much attention to shamans. So we have hardly even begun to probe into these matters.
And is it possible that songs in our everyday life have benefits and capacities we take for granted, or maybe never give a chance to do their magic?
That’s almost certainly true.
If you were seeking healing sounds in other settings, the most obvious place to start is with the organized and patterned sounds of music. Prolonged exposure to drone music must have a significant biological impact. The same must be true of repetitive rhythms. And I have firsthand experience of what an hour spent absorbing the sound of singing bowls can do—I feel better, think better, and sleep better in the aftermath.
This isn’t just speculation on my part. A growing body of evidence confirms that music changes our bodies. Neuroscientists have probably done the most research on this. But I’ve now seen dozens of other studies that confirm music’s capacity to do everything from strengthen our immune system to improve our recovery time from injuries.
This is what healing music looks like in the 21st century. And the fact that it takes place in a hospital or clinic doesn’t change that fact. But maybe some healing happens at the concert hall and nightclub too.
I’d love to see these two worlds come closer together. I wouldn’t be surprised if that convergence turns into a entirely new field of inquiry and practice. Maybe the day will even come when we add another M (for Music) to STEM—and turn it into STEMM.
But my fondest hope is that my medical insurance will one day pay for visits to the jazz club. Hey, I can dream, can’t I?
A worthy rabbit hole if ever there was one.
My tumor was found with an ultra sound. Wish I’d heard of histotripsy, but when the doctor says cancer, creative solutions are understandably last resorts. My father once descended into a drugged delirium during a 2 months long hospital stay. One night, a song of mine he was fond of brought him back from weeks of a blank stare. It was miraculous. The ensuing celebration turned into an impromptu 1AM jam on the oncology floor.
Music heals. And the side effects are all good ones.
A fascinating take! Reminds me of a funny story I once heard about Sun Ra, who was also someone who discovered that his music could alleviate the suffering of mental illness. His biographer John Szwed tells the story of when he visited a Chicago psychiatric hospital in the 50s:
'The group of patients assembled for this early experiment in musical therapy included catatonics and severe schizophrenics, but Sonny approached the job like any other, making no concessions in his music.'
The results were a remarkable success, of sorts:
'While he was playing, a woman who it was said had not moved or spoken for years got up from the floor, walked directly to his piano, and cried out ‘Do you call that music?’ 😂