"The Dangerous Effects of Heavy Metal Music"
If you search for heavy metal in the National Library of Medicine database,
most of what you find is on heavy metal contamination in fish, for example,
making it so hard to clearly establish the role of fish in a healthy diet,
perhaps helping to explain the quintupling of odds
of autoimmune diseases like juvenile arthritis for instance.
But searching the hazards of heavy metal also pops up entries
like this, on the “risks from heavy metal music.”
Here they were talking about traumatic injuries from slamming around,
but you’re more likely to get injured at an alternative rock concert.
It’s the Goo Goo Dolls you’ve got to worry about, not Nine Inch Nails.
Okay sure, music-induced hearing loss is a serious problem,
but that can be from any loud music.
It’s interesting, clinical recommendations
include the “80–90 rule”: no more than 80%
of the maximum volume on personal listening devices
for no more than 90 minutes a day. But that’s not what the science shows;
“do not exceed 60 percent of the maximum volume”
may be more evidence-based, but they figure
teens would just ignore that,
so they came up with more “acceptable” advice.
I assumed I’d see a lot of satanic panic nonsense from the 80’s,
where parents bereaved by suicide started suing heavy metal musicians.
What kind of evidence did the parents present?
There has been little scholarly research until... this study that proceeded
to try to correlate the number of statewide heavy metal magazine
subscriptions to youth suicide rates.
Oh, you’ve got to be kidding.
It got really crazy, though, when researchers
called psychiatric institutions pretending to be parents
worried because their son started listening to that heavy metal music,
even though they made it clear that their son didn’t exhibit
any symptoms of mental illness,
no drugs, no alcohol, and was doing fine at school.
Ten of the twelve facilities believed
the son required psychiatric hospitalization.
Imagine what that would do to a kid!
In turns out if you actually come back a few decades later,
metalheads were signiﬁcantly happier in their youth and appear
better psychologically adjusted than their peers.
Some studies were just strange. Do Parkinson’s patients walk better
listening to “Yellow Submarine” or “Master of Puppets”?
Other studies were just like, duh.
Heavy metal musicians exhibit a higher heart rate than those
performing “contemporary Christian.” Not much of a shocker.
Some studies were kind of cute: the Influence of music on promoting
patient safety during surgery—veterinary patients.
Kitties getting spayed with little earphones on their head.
It turns out that “Adagio for Strings” may be more relaxing than AC/DC.
A review on music therapy for human patients warned that
caution should be exercised when guiding patients in selecting
their music, as “chaotic music,” such us hip-hop and metal,
is not healing to human cells— with three citations no less,
though two of them don’t say anything, and the third
is a nursing newsletter merely quoting someone’s opinion.
But I did some digging, and it turns out stomach cancer cells like metal.
If you play them "Cannibal Corpse" versus Beethoven, 12 hours of
death metal increased their growth in a petri dish (that’s so metal).
But who puts headphones on their stomach?
Or their chests, for that matter?
While in one study, Mozart killed off one type
of breast cancer cell line and not another;
in another study, only Beethoven’s 5th Symphony seemed to work,
and Mozart flopped when the petri dishes were surrounded
by speakers on a little platform.
How do they even get this stuff published?
Anyway, the true danger from heavy metal is headbanging.
"Headbanging is a contemporary dance form consisting of abrupt
ﬂexion–extension movements of the head,"
commonly seen in heavy metal.
The number of avid aﬁcionados is unknown, but some fans
might be endangered by indulging excessively.
Although generally considered harmless, health complications
attributed to this practice include ripping your carotid artery,
rupturing your lung, whiplash injury, and neck fracture,
or in this case a subdural haematoma.
This guy reported headbanging at a Motörhead concert,
and all that brisk forward and backward acceleration might have
ruptured his bridging veins and caused him to bleed into his skull.
Bridging veins bridge the gap between the brain and the covering
that lines the inside of your skull, and if the veins tear,
blood can build up under your skull and compress your brain.
This bridging vein rupture has been demonstrated on headbanging cadavers
(again, a very metal study).
It’s been likened to a kind of shaken-baby syndrome in adults.
The researchers conclude that their case serves as evidence
in support of Motörhead’s rock-and-roll reputation,
but I think the real takeaway is that a potentially dangerous complication
like that can result from a seemingly benign activity.
And some of the brain bleeds can be massive.
Hmm, why did he have a headache after headbanging at a party?
Here’s the CT scan. This is all blood, squooshing his brain over.
It’s amazing he survived, though this poor guy didn’t.
See, you can tear more than just veins.
There are two sets of arteries that tunnel into the skull—
the carotid arteries in the front and the vertebral arteries in the back—
and you can tear both sets.
A 15-year-old indulged in headbanging, ripping his carotid artery,
which led to a massive stroke; and he presented half paralyzed,
and unable to speak, and died in a coma within a week.
What about the vertebral arteries in the back?
They’re wedged into your skull rendering them susceptible to
shearing forces from extremes of neck motion,
and that’s exactly what appeared to happen:
a heavy metal drummer tearing the wall of the artery.
Now obviously, all this is really rare, probably afflicting
less than one in a thousand or so.
What can metalheads do to reduce their risk?
To prevent injury due to such head-banging, the range of head
and neck motion should be reduced;
slower-tempo music should replace metal
(good luck with that); the frequency of head-banging could be only
on every second beat (that’s actually not a bad idea);
or personal protective equipment should be used
(what like a neck brace?).
Little formal injury research has been conducted on the world-wide
phenomenon of head banging; so, researchers constructed
a theoretical head banging model with enough physics terms
to make any nerd happy: angular displacement, sinusoidal motion
in the sagittal plane, amplitude of the displacement curve.
Study participants: head bangers.
But you do need a control group: easy listening music.
Head injury curves; neck injury curves,
based on headbanging tempo and angular sweep.
At an average head banging tempo, we’re trying to keep
the range of motion under 75 degrees, so something like this.
So, to minimize the risk of head and neck injury, head bangers
should decrease their range of head and neck motion.
Oh, there’s that “personal protective equipment” again.
“Unfortunately, it is difﬁcult, if not impossible,
to change the habits of heavy metal aﬁcionados.”
Maybe what we need are metal-studded neck braces.