Our burn unit provides comprehensive burn care to patients ranging in age from newborn to 90 years. Pain control during daily wound care is accomplished with procedural sedation, but escalating anxiety of patients before and during hydrotherapy and wound care remains a common obstacle. Our use of complementary and alternative medicine to augment pain control includes relaxation, meditation, and distraction through the use of staff-directed conversation and ambient music. Until recently, technical difficulties with equipment and radio reception and the wide range of genres necessary to satisfy this multiage patient population have made passive music therapy the least effective of these interventions. The addition of Internet radio, broadcast via wireless (Wi-Fi) and accessed through the hospital’s intranet, has proven an inexpensive and resourceful solution to this problem.

The National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine groups music therapy in the mind-body medicine category along with meditation, prayer, hypnosis, yoga, and...

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