LONDON — In a third-floor room of a London hospital with orange and white walls draped with Tibetan prayer flags, roughly a dozen people gathered recently to perform vocal exercises and sing songs, including folk music from Ghana and Polynesia.
While the participants were drawn to the session by a fondness for music, they also had an ulterior motive for singing: to cope better with lung disease. The weekly group is led by a professional musician and is offered to people with respiratory problems including asthma, emphysema, and Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder, or COPD.
Doctors at London's Royal Brompton Hospital started the program after reasoning that the kind of breathing used by singers might also help lung patients.
"Since many people enjoy singing, we thought it would help them associate controlling their breathing with something pleasant and positive rather than a standard physiotherapy technique," said Dr. Nicholas Hopkinson, the hospital's top chest physician. "It's almost accidental that they learn something about their breathing through singing," he said.
People with COPD have damaged lungs, which limits how much air they can breathe in and out. "Some people start to breathe very rapidly, which aggravates the problem," Hopkinson said. "They take many rapid, shallow breaths and that makes it even harder for them," he said. Hopkinson said learning to sing gives patients better posture and teaches them to breathe at a more manageable rate.
Still, two trials on the singing therapy conducted by Hopkinson and colleagues haven't found much improvement in patients' performance on breathing tests. "The lung function test doesn't change because the underlying disease hasn't changed," he explained. Hopkinson said that in a study comparing patients who went to the singing class versus those who attended a film discussion group, only the patients who sang reported feeling physically better afterwards, even if it couldn't be measured objectively.
Other experts agreed the singing therapy was an unusual but worthy approach. "There's a sound physiological rationale for this," said Dr. Norman Edelman, chief medical officer of the American Lung Association. "Controlled breathing, like the kind you might learn in singing, is very important because people with COPD should try to take deep breaths and slowly synchronize each breath when they're doing something like walking up stairs," he said.
Some experts said singing would probably only appeal to a minority of patients and emphasized it could not replace traditional treatments. "Not everybody wants to sing but everybody can learn exercises to help them," said Julia Bott, a spokeswoman for Britain's Chartered Society of Physiotherapy. She said other activities like yoga and tai chi had breathing techniques similar to the types of physio exercises respiratory patients are usually taught.
