This one is out of the left field! In fact it’s plain amusing.
If surgeons listen to Mozart while looking up a**es, they find more polyps, precancerous growths and tumors. Talk about a Mozart Effect.
It’s not everyone’s ideal career, staring up back passages. I mean, they can’t feel too good about themselves, huh?
So maybe the music makes them feel more harmonious and worthy—look the world in the face, instead of in the a**!
Joking aide, it tells you something. Colonoscopies are far from infallible. If the surgeon having a bad day or not can affect whether your tumor is missed, how reliable is that?
It was only a small study, with 2 doctors, so it’s not to be taken too seriously! In fact it was probably more a bit of propaganda than science.
Previous research has shown that Mozart's music can provide a significant short-term boost to spatial-temporal reasoning, which involves a person's ability to compare and transform mental images in space and time. The present study set out to determine if this would help the detection rates of precancerous polyps during colonoscopies.
It did.
Detection rates for the first doctor were about 67 percent while listening to music and 30 percent with no music. This was up from a baseline detection rate of 21 percent before the study began.
However, the second doctor had an adenoma detection rate of nearly 37 percent with Mozart and 40 percent without the music, his baseline rate was 27 percent. So he did worse (maybe he was a Beethoven fan?) Overall, Mozart was helpful.
So… make sure they do your nether end review with a bit of the old Amadeus through the PA, huh?
I suggest this aria from The Marriage Of Figaro. Lucia Popp (the one in blue) was one of the loveliest voices who ever lived. Trouble is: she didn’t live. She died of a brain tumor, tragically young (remind me to talk with you about miasms, sometime.
This is the song from The Shawshank Redemption by the way.
[SOURCE: American College of Gastroenterology, news release, Oct. 31, 2011]