Anti-Aging Advice: 99 Steps to 100 by Walter M. Bortz, M.D.

What do Florence Nightingale, Plato, the drummer for the Grateful Dead, a 90-year-old nursing home resident, and Dr. Oliver Sacks have in common? Answer: They all prescribe music as therapy.

The Power of Music
The healing power of music has been recognized for centuries. As Congreve wrote in 1697, "Music has charms to soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak." Conferences are now devoted to the healing abilities that music offers. Childbirth, tooth extraction, depression, anxiety, compulsion, hypertension, and many other medical conditions are eased by the effects of music. Music can inspire, stir passion, and create intimacy. For every mood there is a form of music, from funeral marches to hard rock. Music is like sex. It reaches deep inside you, and gives you great pleasure.

Music represents the recapture of the maternal heartbeat first heard before birth. The thrum and throb is heard in nature's drumbeat. A movie or a TV show without music is a bland experience. Correspondingly, life without music seems one-dimensional, like living only in black and white. Music brings order to life, making sense of a chaotic world and bringing enchantment to silent periods. It makes rich harmonies out of the dissonance all around us. It helps us survive.

Keep Music in Your Life
What happens to musical encounters as we age? Too often the weariness of old age inhibits the aesthetic opportunities that music and art provide. The weariness is compounded by sensory loss and other functional impairments, which can restrict access to the exhilarating opportunities that once permeated life. As you age, if you disengage from these cherished habits, life becomes merely a pale shadow of its real self.

Concerts, parades, and festivals are integral to living a full life. Make them as much a part of the latter part of life as they were of the earlier part. Sustain your connection to the sound of music. It will, in turn, sustain, you.

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