Thursday, November 29, 2007

Blood Pressure




In the course of a week, I have had my blood pressure and pulse taken five times. First, it has become a tradition at our family's thanksgiving to take everyone's blood pressure...yeah, I know it's an odd tradition, but we Blanshans are competitive about everything, so we even try to have better blood pressure than the others.
Then, just a few days ago, one of my professors, Brian Dunbar, asked some of us students to help his son, Jason, out with his science project. As a science project, he had decided to study the affects that music has on blood pressure. There were nine of us who did it, and three nurses. A lot of you may know my nurse, Eric Sheldon. First we had our pressure taken, then we were subjected to 3 minutes and 8 seconds of very heavy metal music and our pressure was taken again. Then we had about a 20 minute break before going back in to have our pressure taken again. Then we listened to about the same amount of Mozart...and repeated the taking of the blood pressure. I haven't heard all of the results yet, but in our group, our pressure raised a very little during the heavy metal. The results after the Mozart were remarkable, though! I'm not sure how much mine lowered, but I remember it being quite a bit. My friend, Emily, was in my group, and her pressure had lowered by 26 points after Mozart!