Healing Invisibly: What doctors learn by playing music
There is clearly a symmetry between these two practices. Both deal in transmission, restoration, emotion. It’s a coupling that goes back at least as far as the Ancient Greeks, who had in Apollo a god of both music and healing. Greek iatrikēs, and later Roman medici, used paeans—medical music—in the treatment of a variety of ailments, including melancholia and schizophrenia. Practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, and the griots of western Africa, sing to their patients, while in India, some doctors perform religious chants to calm themselves before surgeries.
Healthcare professionals also have an organized, public performative presence, with numerous classical music orchestras across the globe—the World Doctors Orchestra and the European Doctors Orchestra, and similar regional groups in Los Angeles, Melbourne, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Montreal, and London, among others.
The life of a medical professional, whether doctor, nurse, pharmacist, or technician, is a medley of prescriptions and surgeries, appointments and emergencies. It is a life of constrained schedules. For the vast majority of orchestral medics I spoke to, music was a childhood pursuit; they were musicians long before they were doctors. Some reached the level where a career as either a professional musician or a doctor lay before them, before choosing the unquestionably sounder career path. But the existence of these orchestras is proof that the constraints of a medical life do not preclude creating music, and may well benefit it.
Tim Dornan, a retired internist and endocrinologist in Belfast, Northern Ireland, is a bassoonist with the European Doctors Orchestra. He finds the course of a doctor’s working day replicated in the arc of concert preparation. “You start rehearsing, and there is a crescendo where you enjoy the playing, then it begins to get difficult and you wonder if you’ll ever be able to play it well and you wonder what the concert will be like,” he says, “and then it begins to come together, you do the concert, and there’s a wonderful release of tension. And then you do the same thing all over again.”
The rhythm of preparing for a performance can mirror a doctor’s working conditions, but playing music can also be the antipode to the stress and pressure of the health worker. Clara Gaio Lima, an anesthesiologist from Porto, Portugal, played violin at a high level as a teenager, but stopped to focus on her medical studies. After ten years, the pressures of her work, multiplied during the Covid-19 pandemic, led her back to the violin. Knowing colleagues who desired the same creative outlet, in 2021 she co-founded, with fellow doctors and a professional musician, the Porto-based Orquestra Prescrição Musical (Prescription Music Orchestra).
“Music is a great way to release the emotions that doctors have but are forced to hide because of the nature of their work,” says Gaio Lima. “There is suffering in medicine, but in order to cope, you can’t think too much about it. You have to bottle it up. You have to be human and understand emotions, of course, and those emotions have to go somewhere.”
“All of us who are in the orchestra now are there because we want something else from life, not only medicine,” she adds. “Of course, I think I’m a better doctor if I play. Everything is easier if you’re happy.”
Further down the Portuguese coast, in Lisbon, is the Orquestra Médica Ibérica. Founded in 2022, its members come from across the Iberian Peninsula, as well as further afield—Britain, Ireland, Germany, and Canada. “People didn’t know that we had so many doctors and medical students playing at such a high level,” says Sebastião Martins, a psychiatry resident in Lisbon, and the orchestra’s conductor and artistic director. The group has played three concerts, each in a different Iberian city. “Even professional musicians were not expecting such a high level in an amateur orchestra,” he continues. “Our members show a passion and love for music that you rarely see, even in professional musicians.”
There is clearly a symmetry between these two practices. Both deal in transmission, restoration, emotion. It’s a coupling that goes back at least as far as the Ancient Greeks, who had in Apollo a god of both music and healing. Greek iatrikēs, and later Roman medici, used paeans—medical music—in the treatment of a variety of ailments, including melancholia and schizophrenia. Practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine, and the griots of western Africa, sing to their patients, while in India, some doctors perform religious chants to calm themselves before surgeries.
Healthcare professionals also have an organized, public performative presence, with numerous classical music orchestras across the globe—the World Doctors Orchestra and the European Doctors Orchestra, and similar regional groups in Los Angeles, Melbourne, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Montreal, and London, among others.
The life of a medical professional, whether doctor, nurse, pharmacist, or technician, is a medley of prescriptions and surgeries, appointments and emergencies. It is a life of constrained schedules. For the vast majority of orchestral medics I spoke to, music was a childhood pursuit; they were musicians long before they were doctors. Some reached the level where a career as either a professional musician or a doctor lay before them, before choosing the unquestionably sounder career path. But the existence of these orchestras is proof that the constraints of a medical life do not preclude creating music, and may well benefit it.
Tim Dornan, a retired internist and endocrinologist in Belfast, Northern Ireland, is a bassoonist with the European Doctors Orchestra. He finds the course of a doctor’s working day replicated in the arc of concert preparation. “You start rehearsing, and there is a crescendo where you enjoy the playing, then it begins to get difficult and you wonder if you’ll ever be able to play it well and you wonder what the concert will be like,” he says, “and then it begins to come together, you do the concert, and there’s a wonderful release of tension. And then you do the same thing all over again.”
The rhythm of preparing for a performance can mirror a doctor’s working conditions, but playing music can also be the antipode to the stress and pressure of the health worker. Clara Gaio Lima, an anesthesiologist from Porto, Portugal, played violin at a high level as a teenager, but stopped to focus on her medical studies. After ten years, the pressures of her work, multiplied during the Covid-19 pandemic, led her back to the violin. Knowing colleagues who desired the same creative outlet, in 2021 she co-founded, with fellow doctors and a professional musician, the Porto-based Orquestra Prescrição Musical (Prescription Music Orchestra).
“Music is a great way to release the emotions that doctors have but are forced to hide because of the nature of their work,” says Gaio Lima. “There is suffering in medicine, but in order to cope, you can’t think too much about it. You have to bottle it up. You have to be human and understand emotions, of course, and those emotions have to go somewhere.”
“All of us who are in the orchestra now are there because we want something else from life, not only medicine,” she adds. “Of course, I think I’m a better doctor if I play. Everything is easier if you’re happy.”
Further down the Portuguese coast, in Lisbon, is the Orquestra Médica Ibérica. Founded in 2022, its members come from across the Iberian Peninsula, as well as further afield—Britain, Ireland, Germany, and Canada. “People didn’t know that we had so many doctors and medical students playing at such a high level,” says Sebastião Martins, a psychiatry resident in Lisbon, and the orchestra’s conductor and artistic director. The group has played three concerts, each in a different Iberian city. “Even professional musicians were not expecting such a high level in an amateur orchestra,” he continues. “Our members show a passion and love for music that you rarely see, even in professional musicians.”
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