Picturesque nature scenes can reduce cancer patient’s pain--study

Also, soothing musical sounds can also be played in the background to relieve pain in patients to certain extent, leaving them more at ease, added study researchers.

While commenting on the study findings, lead-study researcher Noah Lechtzin, from the department of medicine at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, explained in an interview given to BBC:

“We wanted to find a way to improve their experience. So we did a study in which patients were assigned to either standard care, to have the procedure done with a nature scene and accompanying nature sounds, or a city scene and city sounds.”

To come to this conclusion, researchers conducted tests on cancer patients undergoing bone marrow aspiration and biopsy (BMAB), a treatment known for being a particularly painful. In this procedure, a marrow is extracted from the pelvic bone of the patient for the treatment purposes under the influence of local anesthetic.

Research study findings
To know how scenes of different kinds effect patient’s psyche, researchers carried out a series of tests in controlled environment, in which cancer patients were either shown the pictures of some scene from nature or a city scene.
Researchers surrounded the patients undergoing treatment with these relaxing pictures like that of a waterfall.

When they measured the level of pain felt by the patients surrounded by scenes of nature, it was found that these patients experienced the peacefulness of nature, and in turn felt less pain.

However, those patients, who were shown the city scene with busy streets, people rushing, not just felt pain but also felt stressed out.

Researchers concluded that the study proves how distraction plays important role in alleviating pain in cancer patients; however, distraction must be relaxing in nature than stressful.

Not all scenes comforting
At the end Lechtzin also revealed, that not all scenes of nature are beneficial in treating cancer patient’s pain.

Medical experts, who want to practice this new method, should be extra careful while picking scenes as some might look good but could end up conveying double meaning, which could be far from smoothing for patients.

“I think there are certain elements of nature that are beneficial and others that could be frightening.

You wouldn’t want to have rocks that potentially dangerous animals could hide behind, whereas our scene was a very open picture that had running water, the sounds had birds chirping and wind rustling through trees,” concluded Lechtzin.