Dr. Lisa Wong is an Assistant Clinical Professor of Pediatrics at Harvard Medical School and a pediatrician in private practice at Milton Pediatric Associates. She graduated from Harvard College in 1979 and earned her medical degree at New York University School of Medicine in 1983, returning to Boston to complete a residency in pediatrics at Massachusetts General Hospital in 1986. In addition to practicing pediatrics, Dr. Wong is an accomplished violinist and violist. From 1991 to 2012, she served as the president of the Longwood Symphony Orchestra, a group comprised of healthcare workers in the Boston area who believe in the healing and humanitarian power of music. Her book, “Scales to Scalpels: Doctors Who Practice the Healing Arts of Music and Medicine,” was published in 2012, and she currently teaches two classes surrounding the intersection of music with community health and neuroscience in the Mind, Brain, and Behavior Department. She also serves as Associate Co-Director of the Arts and Humanities Initiative at Harvard Medical School.
RS: What is your music background, and how did your time at Harvard— both as an undergrad and as a resident at MGH— nurture your interest in music?
LW: I started playing the piano when I was 3, by copycatting my sister who was taking lessons with a teacher who would come to our house. I would climb up on the bench and just parrot back what she had just learned. They soon discovered that I was playing by ear— I did learn to read music eventually! My parents were not musicians but my father Dick Yin Wong, in particular, was a great lover of music. He would have probably played music, but he was from a large family in Hawaii that could not afford it. After the war, he was able to go to law school on the GI Bill. He became an attorney and later became the first Chinese-American federal judge. We benefited from his determination and were fortunate that he was able to give all five siblings the gift of music. My mom was an elementary school teacher. It was through her that I learned to understand the profound value of education. When I went to high school, I volunteered weekly at the Shriner’s Hospital for Crippled Children, which provided corrective surgery for children with congenital orthopedic issues. My friends and I brought our instruments every week. We saw the transformation music had on the kids.
When I left Hawaii and went to Harvard, I knew I wanted to pursue a career that was a combination of music, education, and health: a pediatrician who played music, a music therapist, or a music educator. What really helped me decide was my Expos teacher, who was a freelance writer. He suggested that I observe the different ideas and write about them. So, I spent one day at Buckingham Browne & Nichols School, one day at Mount Auburn Hospital (I ended up volunteering there), and attended several concerts. I wrote about each experience. I ended up concentrating in East Asian Studies, taking my pre-med courses, and enrolling in as many music classes as possible. In my dorm were cellist Yo-Yo Ma; pianist Richard Kogan (now a psychiatrist in New York and still a professional pianist); and violinist Lynn Chang, who is now my husband. I learned a lot of chamber music from listening to them. I also played in Bach Society and [Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra], and volunteered at [Phillips Brooks House Association]… The groups for music and healing, MIHNUET and HRmony, had not yet started in the 70s— I certainly would have joined them if they had! I was fortunate to find many musical colleagues at NYU Medical School and we played at the school, on the wards, and in the community. NYU provided us with $5 tickets to Broadway shows, the NY Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera so between Anatomy exams and clinic, we soaked up as much music as we could. I came back to Boston for residency at MGH, and when I was a senior resident in 1986, the Longwood Symphony Orchestra was started. This was an ensemble that grew quickly from a ragtag group of medical professionals who were simply seeking musical comradeship to a fully formed 80-piece ensemble that remains one of the best amateur orchestras in greater Boston. LSO has been my musical home for 35 years; each of our concerts collaborates with a local medical nonprofit to help them raise funds and awareness about their causes.
RS: There are many therapeutic benefits to music, as you have mentioned. In recent decades, there have been groundbreaking advances in neural imaging that allow real-time imaging of the brain. How do these technologies shape our understanding of what music does to developing or damaged brains?
LW: There are indeed many aspects of music that benefit patients— from reduction of pain to decrease in anxiety and stress and even to gait training and strengthening in post-stroke patients and those living with Parkinson’s Disease. In patients with Alzheimer’s and dementia, music is often the last thing they remember and recognize. This is how all the pieces of medicine and music fit together – and this field is a great example of the value of interdisciplinary work. While our colleagues in music therapy had been observing the benefit of music on these different patient populations for a long time, our music neuroscientist colleagues are now helping us all understand the underlying neuroscientific bases of the observed clinical phenomena, using such research tools as EEG and fMRI (functional MRI). There are no absolute answers yet— this is still a developing field— but the collaboration between neuroscientists, cognitive music psychologists, music educators, musicians, physicians and music therapists is moving the field forward at an astonishing rate.
RS: Musicians often make special efforts to play for elderly populations, specifically those in nursing homes. How do you think COVID-19 impacted these patients in the context of lack of exposure to music therapy and what efforts were made to continue it virtually?
LW: You’re right, nursing homes were deeply impacted. But we learned over time some ways of still playing for patients on FaceTime or Zoom— not ideal, but still offering the human touch across technology— to isolated seniors. But it wasn’t just the seniors who were experiencing this wrenching isolation. The most impactful work we did during the pandemic was starting the Boston Hope Music project. The Boston Hope Hospital was opened at the Boston Convention and Event Center in April 2020, just two months months after the pandemic first hit our city. The Army Corps of Engineers built this 1000-bed hospital in a week! It was a very stark place with cots for beds and curtains for walls, located in a large space that looked like an airport hangar. A friend and colleague, Dr. Ronald Hirschberg, served as the Boston Hope Chief Medical Officer. Of course, he’s also a musician. Ron knew that, besides providing pulmonary rehabilitation, we would need to help patients recover mentally. They started meditation and mindfulness programs— and music. Initially, our vision was to play live for patients like we used to. But due to Covid restrictions, what ended up happening is that we gathered (virtually) musicians from all over the Boston community to record “musical doses” and we created playlists to help patients with their recovery.
When the field hospital closed in June 2020, we realized that there was a need for music to care for our frontline workers too. So, at Mass General, we started the Boston Hope Music Teaching Project. where master’s students from the New England Conservatory offered virtual private music lessons to frontline workers. This was a lifeline for the teaching artists as well as the hospital frontline workers. We also played live for patients at the mass vaccination centers like Fenway Park and Reggie Lewis arena.
RS: There are a lot of similarities between medicine— and learning to be a physician— and music and music pedagogy. How do you think being a musician and engaging in music helps make a physician different?
LW: In both music and medicine, it’s important to learn the basic language of the profession first. For both music and medicine there are times of rigorous, unforgiving work of practicing and studying. But you have to learn your scales and your arpeggios, the basic things. That’s essentially the equivalent of learning biochemistry and organic chemistry: even though you might never explicitly use organic chemistry again, the language and the building blocks are there. Sometimes, people get hung up with learning those basics, that’s the end-all-be-all for them. But really, once you get your technique mastered, you transcend the technique and move on to actually applying it. In music, when looking at the music score, one might think everything is black and white, especially in classical music: the notes are there, and you follow them. But that’s not it at all, is it? There is always flexibility and compromise: it is how we apply our knowledge and life experience to those notes that makes it music. No performance is ever the same as another. When you’re playing in a string quartet, if somebody enters a bit early, you have to adjust, or if in a small chorus, someone is singing a bit sharp, then you adjust. In other genres of music, there’s even more flexibility and improvisation— but always within a framework. The same principle applies in medicine. In surgery, surgeons have a prescribed procedure that they are following. But they must always think on their feet— they are always adjusting, making quick decisions within the broader parameters of the procedure. And it's the same in primary care, which is what I do. Every single day when I practice medicine, I have to improvise a little bit, and always be creative, especially with young children. Not every case is identical— it never is, and never will be. You can see ten kids with the same symptoms and come up with several different diagnoses. You could see a baby that has diabetes at 18 months, and you’ll follow them all the way until they graduate from college, but each step of the way, you’re going to adjust to how they’re growing, how they have learned to live with their illness, how they are interacting with their peers, all of those things. You’re always making adjustments, and the same thing applies when you’re playing a piece. You’re always making adjustments. The flexibility that you learn as a musician translates perfectly to medicine.
RS: Looking ahead, in what directions do you foresee music therapy going, and how do you think the many allied fields that do this research will work together to build a cohesive understanding of music’s cognitive and medical impacts?
LW: I’m very hopeful for this field which I’ve seen leap ahead over the past 20 years, thanks to many colleagues here in Boston and beyond. Music therapy, music medicine, music neuroscience, music education— these are all linked and the great thing is that we are all listening to each other and working together. It is pretty universally accepted that music is good for health and wellbeing but being able to prove it in different ways is a big challenge— we’re going to need to come up with a new interdisciplinary language. The whole field of arts in health is struggling with defining the most appropriate forms of research. The accepted scientific methods of double-blind randomized control trials of, say, playing music for children, might not be the best research model. But there are some really good people working on this and thinking about it. Recently, the NIH and The Kennedy Center for Performing Arts launched an ambitious collaborative project called “Sound Health.” Opera star Renee Fleming and NIH director Dr. Francis Collins, himself an accomplished musician, are involved with that collaboration. There’s also great interest in the field of arts and health from the arts side at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m particularly excited that just this year the American Association for Medical Colleges, (AAMC), introduced the FRAHME initiative “Fundamental Role of Arts and Humanities in Medical Education,” which is another sign that this intersection between arts and medicine is coming into the public space and not as niche as it used to be. There are also new commercial applications of music and medicine that are taking the field in a different exciting direction. There’s a startup that I’m aware of that’s using music to help dyslexic kids read by associating musical tones with words. There’s also a company called MedRhythms, which is creating commercial products to help stroke victims and also Parkinson’s patients walk more effectively through gait training while listening to the beat of music!The field is definitely rapidly developing in many sectors. So the future is bright— there’s much to learn and much to be done.
About the Author
Raj Sastry is a sophomore at Harvard College concentrating in History and Science.
RS: What is your music background, and how did your time at Harvard— both as an undergrad and as a resident at MGH— nurture your interest in music?
LW: I started playing the piano when I was 3, by copycatting my sister who was taking lessons with a teacher who would come to our house. I would climb up on the bench and just parrot back what she had just learned. They soon discovered that I was playing by ear— I did learn to read music eventually! My parents were not musicians but my father Dick Yin Wong, in particular, was a great lover of music. He would have probably played music, but he was from a large family in Hawaii that could not afford it. After the war, he was able to go to law school on the GI Bill. He became an attorney and later became the first Chinese-American federal judge. We benefited from his determination and were fortunate that he was able to give all five siblings the gift of music. My mom was an elementary school teacher. It was through her that I learned to understand the profound value of education. When I went to high school, I volunteered weekly at the Shriner’s Hospital for Crippled Children, which provided corrective surgery for children with congenital orthopedic issues. My friends and I brought our instruments every week. We saw the transformation music had on the kids.
When I left Hawaii and went to Harvard, I knew I wanted to pursue a career that was a combination of music, education, and health: a pediatrician who played music, a music therapist, or a music educator. What really helped me decide was my Expos teacher, who was a freelance writer. He suggested that I observe the different ideas and write about them. So, I spent one day at Buckingham Browne & Nichols School, one day at Mount Auburn Hospital (I ended up volunteering there), and attended several concerts. I wrote about each experience. I ended up concentrating in East Asian Studies, taking my pre-med courses, and enrolling in as many music classes as possible. In my dorm were cellist Yo-Yo Ma; pianist Richard Kogan (now a psychiatrist in New York and still a professional pianist); and violinist Lynn Chang, who is now my husband. I learned a lot of chamber music from listening to them. I also played in Bach Society and [Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra], and volunteered at [Phillips Brooks House Association]… The groups for music and healing, MIHNUET and HRmony, had not yet started in the 70s— I certainly would have joined them if they had! I was fortunate to find many musical colleagues at NYU Medical School and we played at the school, on the wards, and in the community. NYU provided us with $5 tickets to Broadway shows, the NY Philharmonic and the Metropolitan Opera so between Anatomy exams and clinic, we soaked up as much music as we could. I came back to Boston for residency at MGH, and when I was a senior resident in 1986, the Longwood Symphony Orchestra was started. This was an ensemble that grew quickly from a ragtag group of medical professionals who were simply seeking musical comradeship to a fully formed 80-piece ensemble that remains one of the best amateur orchestras in greater Boston. LSO has been my musical home for 35 years; each of our concerts collaborates with a local medical nonprofit to help them raise funds and awareness about their causes.
RS: There are many therapeutic benefits to music, as you have mentioned. In recent decades, there have been groundbreaking advances in neural imaging that allow real-time imaging of the brain. How do these technologies shape our understanding of what music does to developing or damaged brains?
LW: There are indeed many aspects of music that benefit patients— from reduction of pain to decrease in anxiety and stress and even to gait training and strengthening in post-stroke patients and those living with Parkinson’s Disease. In patients with Alzheimer’s and dementia, music is often the last thing they remember and recognize. This is how all the pieces of medicine and music fit together – and this field is a great example of the value of interdisciplinary work. While our colleagues in music therapy had been observing the benefit of music on these different patient populations for a long time, our music neuroscientist colleagues are now helping us all understand the underlying neuroscientific bases of the observed clinical phenomena, using such research tools as EEG and fMRI (functional MRI). There are no absolute answers yet— this is still a developing field— but the collaboration between neuroscientists, cognitive music psychologists, music educators, musicians, physicians and music therapists is moving the field forward at an astonishing rate.
RS: Musicians often make special efforts to play for elderly populations, specifically those in nursing homes. How do you think COVID-19 impacted these patients in the context of lack of exposure to music therapy and what efforts were made to continue it virtually?
LW: You’re right, nursing homes were deeply impacted. But we learned over time some ways of still playing for patients on FaceTime or Zoom— not ideal, but still offering the human touch across technology— to isolated seniors. But it wasn’t just the seniors who were experiencing this wrenching isolation. The most impactful work we did during the pandemic was starting the Boston Hope Music project. The Boston Hope Hospital was opened at the Boston Convention and Event Center in April 2020, just two months months after the pandemic first hit our city. The Army Corps of Engineers built this 1000-bed hospital in a week! It was a very stark place with cots for beds and curtains for walls, located in a large space that looked like an airport hangar. A friend and colleague, Dr. Ronald Hirschberg, served as the Boston Hope Chief Medical Officer. Of course, he’s also a musician. Ron knew that, besides providing pulmonary rehabilitation, we would need to help patients recover mentally. They started meditation and mindfulness programs— and music. Initially, our vision was to play live for patients like we used to. But due to Covid restrictions, what ended up happening is that we gathered (virtually) musicians from all over the Boston community to record “musical doses” and we created playlists to help patients with their recovery.
When the field hospital closed in June 2020, we realized that there was a need for music to care for our frontline workers too. So, at Mass General, we started the Boston Hope Music Teaching Project. where master’s students from the New England Conservatory offered virtual private music lessons to frontline workers. This was a lifeline for the teaching artists as well as the hospital frontline workers. We also played live for patients at the mass vaccination centers like Fenway Park and Reggie Lewis arena.
RS: There are a lot of similarities between medicine— and learning to be a physician— and music and music pedagogy. How do you think being a musician and engaging in music helps make a physician different?
LW: In both music and medicine, it’s important to learn the basic language of the profession first. For both music and medicine there are times of rigorous, unforgiving work of practicing and studying. But you have to learn your scales and your arpeggios, the basic things. That’s essentially the equivalent of learning biochemistry and organic chemistry: even though you might never explicitly use organic chemistry again, the language and the building blocks are there. Sometimes, people get hung up with learning those basics, that’s the end-all-be-all for them. But really, once you get your technique mastered, you transcend the technique and move on to actually applying it. In music, when looking at the music score, one might think everything is black and white, especially in classical music: the notes are there, and you follow them. But that’s not it at all, is it? There is always flexibility and compromise: it is how we apply our knowledge and life experience to those notes that makes it music. No performance is ever the same as another. When you’re playing in a string quartet, if somebody enters a bit early, you have to adjust, or if in a small chorus, someone is singing a bit sharp, then you adjust. In other genres of music, there’s even more flexibility and improvisation— but always within a framework. The same principle applies in medicine. In surgery, surgeons have a prescribed procedure that they are following. But they must always think on their feet— they are always adjusting, making quick decisions within the broader parameters of the procedure. And it's the same in primary care, which is what I do. Every single day when I practice medicine, I have to improvise a little bit, and always be creative, especially with young children. Not every case is identical— it never is, and never will be. You can see ten kids with the same symptoms and come up with several different diagnoses. You could see a baby that has diabetes at 18 months, and you’ll follow them all the way until they graduate from college, but each step of the way, you’re going to adjust to how they’re growing, how they have learned to live with their illness, how they are interacting with their peers, all of those things. You’re always making adjustments, and the same thing applies when you’re playing a piece. You’re always making adjustments. The flexibility that you learn as a musician translates perfectly to medicine.
RS: Looking ahead, in what directions do you foresee music therapy going, and how do you think the many allied fields that do this research will work together to build a cohesive understanding of music’s cognitive and medical impacts?
LW: I’m very hopeful for this field which I’ve seen leap ahead over the past 20 years, thanks to many colleagues here in Boston and beyond. Music therapy, music medicine, music neuroscience, music education— these are all linked and the great thing is that we are all listening to each other and working together. It is pretty universally accepted that music is good for health and wellbeing but being able to prove it in different ways is a big challenge— we’re going to need to come up with a new interdisciplinary language. The whole field of arts in health is struggling with defining the most appropriate forms of research. The accepted scientific methods of double-blind randomized control trials of, say, playing music for children, might not be the best research model. But there are some really good people working on this and thinking about it. Recently, the NIH and The Kennedy Center for Performing Arts launched an ambitious collaborative project called “Sound Health.” Opera star Renee Fleming and NIH director Dr. Francis Collins, himself an accomplished musician, are involved with that collaboration. There’s also great interest in the field of arts and health from the arts side at the National Endowment for the Arts. I’m particularly excited that just this year the American Association for Medical Colleges, (AAMC), introduced the FRAHME initiative “Fundamental Role of Arts and Humanities in Medical Education,” which is another sign that this intersection between arts and medicine is coming into the public space and not as niche as it used to be. There are also new commercial applications of music and medicine that are taking the field in a different exciting direction. There’s a startup that I’m aware of that’s using music to help dyslexic kids read by associating musical tones with words. There’s also a company called MedRhythms, which is creating commercial products to help stroke victims and also Parkinson’s patients walk more effectively through gait training while listening to the beat of music!The field is definitely rapidly developing in many sectors. So the future is bright— there’s much to learn and much to be done.
About the Author
Raj Sastry is a sophomore at Harvard College concentrating in History and Science.