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“Dance and forget your sickness” - An ethnological study of the interaction between patients and the medical conceptual world, and the role of music in a healing process.

This study is based on interviews with four people. It describes their experiences with the health care system and the role of music in their lives. What these people have in common is that their illnesses are not verifiable from a normal medical perspective. The overall purpose is to describe this interaction with medical care and discuss what role music might have in the mitigation of the perceived illness.

The patient-healthcare interaction is analysed from a theoretical discourse perspective. The analysis reveals some of the mechanisms in the medical establishment’s discourse that reinforce its own conclusions by simplifying what is actually quite complex; the inner world of the patient.

Considering the powerful position medical science has taken in our modern world it is relevant for medicine to be able to respond to and manage health problems arising in complex personal processes, or what can be described as existential illness. This study describes how the current healthcare establishment has come to focus unilaterally on physical health, supplanting the existential dimension of health that it cannot respond to.

The results of this study showed that all people experienced that (current established) healthcare alone could not cure their illness in a satisfactory manner. The study also showed that music played a major role in the relief of specific symptoms. Music also helped patients find meaning, despite their illness, as part of a greater cultural and social world.