What is Public Health and What's the Connection to Music?

For a while now, I’ve known about my interest in life science. And at first, when I thought about life science, the only thing that came to my mind was medicine. I always pictured hospitals, ambulances, surgeons, and various physicians. But what I rarely thought about, was the research aspect of medicine. What I was thinking of when I thought of medicine, in general, was clinical medicine, treating the problem immediately. So then what about the research aspect of medicine?

I recently learned about a part of medicine called public health. The googled definition of public health is “the health of the population as a whole, especially as the subject of government regulation and support.” And this made absolutely no sense to me because it still didn’t answer my question, what is public health? I was able to find a video (linked below for further information) that explained it perfectly. Basically, clinical medicine, as I stated above, treats the problem immediately, and public health uses the problem and its surroundings to try to omit this problem in the future. The example they used in the video was about an accident. In clinical medicine, medics would take the injured person to the hospital and treat them. But, in public health, the factors of the accident and reasons for the injury would be taken into account to ensure that it wouldn’t happen again. Like, was the driver sleepy? Was the road too narrow? Had the driver been drinking? Anything that can help prevent the problem from happening again.

From the promotion of healthy lifestyles to the research for disease prevention (vaccines), it’s all a part of public health! We can see how public health is taking effect in our daily lives. COVID-19 tested the public health system on a global scale. With COVID-19, the promotion of wearing masks, hand-sanitizing, and staying six feet apart are all public health regulations to try to stop the spread of the virus, whereas, immediate treatment of patients in hospitals is an example of clinical medicine. Though some of these guidelines created much political turmoil, they were enacted to help support the health of our society, and because this was a pandemic, our world. Other aspects like vaccines that are being created and tested are preventions and protections for the virus. Analytics, such as Johns Hopkins University’s COVID-19 tracker, maps out the fluctuation in the case numbers from March of 2020. Public health workers can use this data to predict future case numbers and take preventative measures to try to keep the number down.

So does that mean music can be a part of medicine? Absolutely! Music, even if it can’t directly connect with clinical medicine (sometimes it can!), it is most definitely included in public health. As soon as I learned this, I was so excited. My interest in music could be interwoven with my interest in public health. I began to research how much of an impact music can actually have and I found this study conducted in 2013. The Danish Health and Morbidity Surveys were given to Danish adults consisting of 8 questions about music in their daily lives. Through the 14,265 responses, we learned that 77% of those surveyed believe that music is important to maintaining good health. But what does this mean in terms of public health?

It continues to show that music is impactful and important. Using this conclusion, public health workers can use music and its variations (singing, playing, or just listening) in different activities to promote good mental health and healthy life.

I will be documenting my journey of understanding music’s role in public health. I want this blog to be a place for me to explain my findings and connections. I think it’s amazing that I have the opportunity to explore my passions and even more awesome that I can find a way to combine them.

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Link to the sources I mentioned:

LO Bonde, K Ekholm, K Juel. “Music and Public Health. The use of music in everyday life of adult Danes its health implications: Lars Ole Bonde.” European Journal of Public Health, Oxford Academic, 05 October 2015. https://academic.oup.com/eurpub/article/25/suppl_3/ckv174.072/2484342.

“What is Public Health??” YouTube, uploaded by Let’s Learn Public Health, 15 June 2017, https://youtu.be/t_eWESXTnic.