Role of Music Therapy in Burns Management: A Review of Literature
Sriram VS1 and Ravi Kumar Chittoria2*
Burn injuries are associated with substantial procedural and background pain and anxiety, particularly during dressing changes and debridement, and pharmacological analgesia alone is often insufficient to control this distress. Music therapy and music medicine have emerged as low-cost, non-pharmacological adjuncts thought to act through attentional distraction, anxiolysis, and autonomic and neuroendocrine modulation. This narrative review summarises available randomised controlled trials, systematic reviews, and metaanalyses examining music intervention in burn care. Foundational crossover trials demonstrated reductions in pain, anxiety, and muscle tension during debridement and dressing changes, findings later replicated in larger trials addressing both procedural and background pain. Three recent meta-analyses, pooling over two thousand patients, confirm statistically significant reductions in pain and anxiety, although the magnitude of benefit appears to depend on timing of delivery relative to the procedure. Evidence in paediatric burn patients remains limited and less consistent. Across the literature, music intervention is consistently reported as safe and well tolerated, with no significant adverse effects. However, the overall quality of evidence is limited by small trial sizes, heterogeneous protocols, and inherent challenges in blinding. Music therapy should therefore be regarded as a useful adjunct within a multimodal pain management strategy rather than a
substitute for established pharmacological treatment.
