Music in the Operating Room: “Can You Hear Me Now?”

I can remember a time when chiefs of service or operating room (OR) supervisors would not allow music in the operating room. Today, if any such restrictions still exist, they are the exception rather than the rule. As Drs Lies and Zhang point out in their excellent article, “Prospective Randomized Study of the Effect of Music on the Efficiency of Surgical Closures,”1 music in the OR has become ubiquitous, and there is wide belief in its actual benefits. Yet there are concerns that merit our attention with respect to patient comfort, the OR team, and even issues of medical liability.I am comfortable with listening to music while performing surgery and have done so throughout my surgical career, though initially my mentor and chief, Dr Josh Jurkiewicz, did not approve. I believe it was my penchant for Mozart that eventually won him over. While I still love Mozart, I sometimes choose popular music rather than classical. In fact, I am particularly fond of the Beatles and get a kick out of remembering myself as a schoolboy listening to their music, never imagining that 50 years hence I would be performing a facelift to the familiar strains of “Love Me Do.”Clearly, taste in music is a personal matter but the type of music played in the OR, as well as who selected it, may have an impact. In a 1994 study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association ( JAMA ), it was shown that autonomic reactivity in a number of key physiological measures relevant to performing surgery, as well as speed and accuracy of task performance, were significantly higher with music vs without, particularly when surgeons listened to self-selected music as opposed to …