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30 Aug, 2011

Turkish doctors call the tune with traditional musical cures – The Guardian

Standing by the bed of a Cypriot patient who has just undergone vascular surgery, Dr Bingür Sönmez consults a screen monitoring pulse and blood pressure.

Then a colleague pulls out a flute and starts playing a popular Turkish tune.

If that appears an unusual approach to modern medicine, then it is. But according to doctors at the reassuringly modern Memorial hospital in Istanbul, it is producing results.

Here, Sönmez and his colleague, Dr Erol Can, are reviving traditional Islamic music therapy, a form of medical treatment that is almost 1,000 years old.

via Turkish doctors call the tune with traditional musical cures | World news | The Guardian.