Webster's dictionary defines music as "vocal, instrumental, or mechanical sounds having rhythm, melody, or harmony." To Deanna Edwards, a singer/songwriter whose songs have helped ease the pain and fear for hundreds of sick and dying patients, the dictionary definition is lacking. "Although I can't put into words what music does to us," she says, "I believe that music transcends the physical and touches the soul.

Edwards is so confident that music helps people, she has made it her profession. With her guitar in hand, Edwards travels around the world, sharing her music with thousands of sick and terminally ill patients. When describing how her music helps patients, Edwards says, "Terminally ill and sick patients often receive music on a much deeper level than they do the spoken or written word." She points out that listening to a song can affect how we feel. She says music can open us to being happy, sad, or even transport us back in time to a fond memory. She has incorporated this idea into her work, titling one of her books, Music Brings My Heart Back Home.

As proof of how deeply music can touch us, Edwards recalls a recent trip to South Africa where she visited a 36 year-old man who had been in a coma for six weeks.

"I was asked to sing Danny Boy to him, and when I did, tears began to trickle out of his eyes," she said. "It was then I realized there was still a living person in there."

Edwards began using to heal in 1972 when a friend asked her if she would come to the Mennonite Hospital in Bloomington, Illinois and sing a few songs to the patients there. "At first I didn't want to go," she remembered, "but after seeing the effect my music had on patients, I felt the need to return again and again."

After the first few visits to the hospital, Edwards realized that while the songs she was singing pleased the patients, the words had no real meaning to them. She points out that with a few exceptions popular music doesn't deal with the world that some terminally ill patients face.

"In our society," she says, "we have used music for entertainment purposes only, and as a result most of the songs are filled with stories about falling in and out of love, not harsher realities like sickness and death."

Edwards began to write songs for the people she sang to. Claiming that "we lose our innocence in sickness," her songs deal with the fear and the pain that accompany illness, as well as the hope and joy of recovery. Edwards is not alone in her belief that music therapy can help the healing process. In the United States, music therapy was first recognized when it was used for World War 11 veterans suffering from what was then termed "battle fatigue." Today over 100 universities offer degrees in music therapy.

Modern science has validated what Edwards knows intuitively - that music has a physiological effect on us. It can lower our blood pressure and slow breathing down. As a result, music is used in the health care industry in a wide variety of ways. Music is now being used to assist doctors, nurses, and patients in everything from pain management to childbirth.