Imagine you are a newborn baby in an intensive care unit. Maybe you were born prematurely, or didn’t get enough oxygen during the delivery. There might be an IV in your tiny arm, with a small board holding it down so you can’t rip it out. You might have a tube going into your nose. You are alone, finally stabilizing after a traumatic event. But then, the doctors come in.
“It’s as if you are finally safe in your nice warm bed and suddenly, out of nowhere, someone rips the sheets off of you, opens the window to let the freezing cold air in, shines bright lights in your face—and you’re powerless,” says Christine Vaskas Churba, a music therapist at The Louis Armstrong Center for Music and Medicine at Mount Sinai hospital in New York. Vaskas Churba works in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU), and these babies are her patients. They are creatures of touch and sound whose physiological systems are still in development. How can they be soothed in an environment where they are lost, terrified, uncomprehending?
Vaskas Churba does it by playing them music—not through speakers, but right there, next to them. “Our goal is to recreate womb sounds,” she says. “It is always live, because we can change the music in the moment. When the baby’s heart rate increases, we can match them where they are and bring them down.”
To do this, Vaskas Churba employs a few special instruments. One of them is called a Gato Box, which can recreate the rhythm of a mother’s heartbeat. Another is called a Remo ocean disc—a drum with small beads inside of it that whoosh back and forth, mimicking the sound of fluids flowing in the womb.
Terrified babies, stuck in fight-or-flight mode, attach to these familiar noises and slowly calm themselves down. They begin to breathe more naturally on their own and nurse more successfully. They transition more peacefully into sleep, and research even indicates that the music helps increase oxygen saturation. These are all benefits associated with babies being allowed to remain on a mother’s chest; but in the NICU, where that is not possible, music and tones do the work, standing in for nature.
[To read the rest of this article by Jayson Greene, click here.]
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