South Florida man battling rare cancer finds solace in music therapy
There's a lot Mo Kraiem wants you to know about him. He loves playing sports and going to the gym. Much further down that list
By Morgan Rynor
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MIAMI (WFOR) — There’s a lot Mo Kraiem wants you to know about him. He loves playing sports and going to the gym. Much further down that list, he’s battling cancer.
“My gym friend saw a lump on my arm and he touched it accidentally. When he saw me flinch he was like ‘hey, if that really hurts, you need to go get it checked out’,” he said.
Kraiem ended up at the Sylvester Comprehensive Cancer Center in 2022. He has a rare and aggressive form of soft tissue sarcoma. Three years of chemo, radiation and surgeries later, he still has tumors. So even though cancer was not at the top of the list, it was all he could think about.
“What’s the point if the cancer is going to keep coming back?” he said. “What’s the point of living, of doing treatment, of trying to find any hope? I was extremely depressed.”
Music is a life changer That is, until David Cote walked into his room. Cote is a graduate teaching assistant at the University of Miami’s Frost School of Music.
“Music has the ability to change our emotions and modify how we feel, change our physical, psychological and physiological arousal levels, to become more energetic or more relaxed, depending on what the music is doing,” Cote said.
Cote introduced Kraiem to music therapy, where together they drummed it out.
“The louder I go, the more anxiety I let out,” Kraiem said. “Or frustration I let out.”
He said light drumming had a calming effect.
“A lot calmer on this because I’m slowing down the beat and just taking it all in,” he said.
But it’s writing down how he feels, or songwriting, that Kraiem has found his true passion in.
“I used that as a message, not just for me to give me hope, but to give other cancer patients hope and other people who are going through any type of other situation,” Kraiem said about his music.
Science behind the music Dr. Frank Penedo is the director of cancer survivorship at Sylvester.
“We know that music activates certain regions of the brain that are associated with mood, emotional regulation and attention. For reasons we don’t fully understand, we know that when somebody listens to music, and is enjoying the music, those areas are activated,” Penedo said. “Once you activate those areas, you may even have a release of specific hormones that are ‘feel good’ hormones.”
Penedo said the next phase of their research grant is to understand the biological component. Why is it that music not only emotionally makes people feel better, but physically as well?
Kraiem is just happy to be proof of it.
“If it wasn’t for the music therapy and the other services that I receive at Sylvester and my family, I wouldn’t have made it through this thing,” he said. “I would have given up a long time ago.”
Music therapy is not just for cancer patients. It can help with general mental health.
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