A professor’s quest to bring music and medicine together in the ICU

Music therapy has been broadly adopted in healthcare, but live performances rarely make their way into an intensive care unit.

The ICU is where Dr. Joseph Schlesinger is hoping to change that — showing music doesn’t just make people feel better — the benefits can also be measured.

And maybe one day, music could be prescribed a bit like medication: one hour of live jazz, once a week. Schlesinger and his team presented some of their early findings in Germany late last year.

To further quantify the benefits of live music in critical care, Schlesinger is trying to make more physicians who, like himself, are musicians first. He’s an anesthesiologist who studied jazz piano at Loyola.

He’s mentoring Vanderbilt senior and saxophonist Omar Adada and sophomore bassist Charles Ruble. Both are keeping up their pre-med studies while also being part of the Blair School of Music. When schedules permit, they go room to room with Schlesinger, playing light jazz to critically ill patients. They invited This is Nashville host Blake Farmer to tag along on a recent ICU visit.