About MMI

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The Medical Musician Initiative was founded in 2018 to to train professional musicians in pertinent aspects of 

critical  care medicine so as to incorporate them into ICU medical teams, thereby  enhancing the healing process of critically ill patients, and to develop and support research to study the best means  of using music as medicine in critical care.

The MMI story began in July 2009 when a patient arrived in the Surgical Intensive Care Unit at Beth Israel Medical Center in New York. The patient was  clinically dead after major surgery but was resuscitated and put into a medically induced coma.  The patient was Andrew Schulman.

On the third day of the coma Schulman was still desperately ill and in a downward spiral. The efforts of his doctors and nurses were not saving him, diligent though they were. His wife, Wendy, had an epiphany that only music could save him. She got permission to insert the earbuds of his iPod so he could listen to his favorite music, the St. Matthew Passion by J.S. Bach. As witnessed by the medical team, the music saved his life by stabilizing him and reversing the metabolic process that was killing him.

Six months later, in January 2010, Schulman, a professional guitarist, now fully recovered, got permission to return to the Surgical ICU with his guitar to play for critically ill patients. Over the next three years, working closely with the SICU medical team, he developed the basic principles of the Medical Musician specialty: "A professional concert level musician with pertinent training in critical care medicine, who is a member of the medical team in a critical care unit". 

The skill set of the medical musician is based on "META" - Musical expression, Empathy, Teamwork, and Assessment. The primary function of a medical musician in a critical care unit is to balance the brain. “Nothing activates the brain so extensively as music.” - Oliver  Sacks.

Andrew Schulman has since been joined by the team represented here in this Web site. We invite you to explore these pages and to get in touch with us if you are interested in learning more about how valuable live music can be in the world of critical care medicine.

The Medical Musician Initiative is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization. All donations are tax deductible to the extent permitted by law.