Creating Therapeutic Journeys with Music: Kerry Devlin, MMT, Senior Music Therapist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Music and Medicine

Raise the Line

When Raise the Line host and third year medical student Shiv Gaglani witnessed the creation of a “heart song” at the bedside of a terminal patient during his recent neurology clerkship, he immediately wanted to know more about the clinical applications of music therapy and realized the Osmosis audience would want to as well. That’s why we’re happy to bring you this fascinating episode featuring Shiv’s interview with Kerry Devlin, MMT, a senior music therapist at the Johns Hopkins Center for Music and Medicine. “I like to describe music therapy as a relational therapeutic encounter. Music is both the tool that I'm using as a music therapist, but it's also the medium that we're working in. And we're using that tool and that therapeutic medium to travel together to work towards someone's individualized healthcare goals,” Devlin says. In the case of dying patients, she creates music that incorporates recordings of their heartbeat and breath sounds with their favorite song and gives the result to the family as a keepsake. For other patients, she adapts her work to suit their clinical situation such as taking a rhythmic approach with people dealing with movement disorders or singing with someone with Parkinson’s disease to help them maintain articulation. As you’ll learn, the applications are wide ranging and include group work as well as one-on-one sessions. This is a meaningful and memorable episode you won’t want to miss about a powerful therapeutic tool whose use is growing.

Mentioned in this episode: https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/center-for-music-and-medicine