Music therapy practices and doctors' opinions in Turkey

The aim of this research is to examine the practices in music therapy in Turkey and to explain which music therapy studies have been carried out in our country from past to present and the views of physicians about music therapy in the light of scientific data. It has been determined that music therapy has an important place in the Turks, starting from the pre-Islamic period, in the Seljuk and Ottoman Periods. Today, the Ministry of Health has included music therapy in Traditional Complementary Medicine Practices in 2014. It has been seen that music therapy, which has become official in our country, has started to gain more and more importance day by day. This research was designed as a qualitative study. Since the research has the nature of due diligence, it is a descriptive study with the scanning model. A descriptive survey model was used in the study. It was aimed to determine the opinions of physicians about music therapy through semi-structured forms prepared by the researcher, and the opinions of 15 physicians were consulted. During the interviews with the physicians, open-ended questions were asked to the physicians and these interviews were analyzed with the content analysis method and included in the study. Personal information form and open-ended question form were used to collect data. As a result of the study, it was concluded that the physicians thought that music therapy would be beneficial in other diseases, especially in psychiatric disorders, that the majority of the participants thought that physicians and music educators should apply music therapy, and that they did not have sufficient knowledge about music therapy.