12/09/2026
4 years ago, we walked into his room hoping to lift his spirits. Instead, his spirit lifted ours ❤️
What stayed with us most was his strength, his willingness to meet us in that moment with courage, joy, and presence despite everything he was facing.
At Crush Kancer, we use patient-preferred music as part of our psychosocial and emotional support not simply for entertainment. Research suggests that music can meaningfully support the emotional wellbeing of people living with cancer.
Studies have found that self-selected or preferred music may help improve mood, reduce psychological distress, and support patients during cancer treatment. For example, a multisite study involving 750 patients receiving outpatient chemotherapy found that listening to self-selected music significantly increased positive mood while reducing negative mood and distress, although it did not significantly reduce pain Harper et al. (2023) (Using Music as a Tool for Distress Reduction During Cancer Chemotherapy Treatment).
Research involving patients undergoing radiotherapy has also found that preferred music can contribute to lower anxiety and treatment-related distress (Clark et al., 2006), while another randomized study reported that some patients experienced self-selected music as supportive and distracting and felt that treatment time passed more quickly (O’Callaghan et al., 2012).
More broadly, a Cochrane systematic review of 81 studies involving 5,576 cancer patients concluded that music interventions may have beneficial effects on anxiety, depression, hope, pain, and fatigue, although the authors emphasized that much of the evidence was of low or very low certainty (Bradt et al., 2021).
Together, these findings support our approach of asking patients what music they enjoy and using it to create moments of connection, positive emotion, self-expression, and engagement during what can otherwise be an extremely difficult period of their lives.
