Bridging Medicine and Music for Healing, Dr. Lisa Wong

August 1, 2025
COVER STORY

“From late-night NICU duets to building musical bridges between hospital wards and public schools, her story isn’t about balancing separate callings, but about weaving them into a shared language of healing. Through her reflections, we witness how attention can be a form of care, how art can hold what data cannot, and how medicine-at its best-requires both rigor and resonance.”

Bridging Medicine and Music for Healing,
Dr. Lisa Wong

What does it mean to listen-not only to patients, but to silence, uncertainty, beauty, and becoming?

This question reverberates through the life and work of Dr. Lisa Wong, a pediatrician, violist, educator, and longtime leader of the Longwood Symphony Orchestra. In this conversation, Dr. Wong doesn’t simply trace a path at the intersection of music and medicine-she invites us to imagine a practice where the two are inseparable.

From late-night NICU duets to building musical bridges between hospital wards and public schools, her story isn’t about balancing separate callings, but about weaving them into a shared language of healing. Through her reflections, we witness how attention can be a form of care, how art can hold what data cannot, and how medicine-at its best-requires both rigor and resonance.

We share this interview not just to spotlight an extraordinary physician-musician, but because Dr. Wong’s vision feels urgent. At a time when medicine strains under the weight of speed, scale, and systemic noise, her work reminds us that attentiveness, creativity, and collaboration are not luxuries-they’re lifelines.

From the Editors

Your journey beautifully bridges the worlds of medicine and music. Could you share how those two paths first came together in your life?

I’m originally from Honolulu, Hawaii. After WWII, my father, who grew up in poverty, went to Northwestern Law School in Chicago on the GI bill. This changed his life. He went on to become the first Chinese-American judge in the U.S. federal courts. While he was in Chicago, my father fell in love with classical music – so much so, that when he had a family of his own, he was determined to make sure that my four siblings and I would have the opportunity for music education that he never did. My mother, an elementary school teacher, facilitated a rich musical environment in our home. Thus, I grew up playing in a string quartet with my siblings, and went on to learn several instruments, including piano, violin, viola, cello, ukulele and guitar. Our family ensemble often played for our grandparents as well as at schools and in hospitals. It was through these experiences in the hospitals that I first witnessed the healing power that music could have on a child in pain. By the time I got to college, I was committed to mapping out a lifelong journey in music, health, and education.

Many of our readers are early-career physicians navigating intense training. How has music helped sustain you personally and professionally in your medical journey?

Music has always been an emotional refuge for me – in times of joy, sorrow, stress or accomplishment. Even as a young student, I’d go to the piano when math got too hard or if I disagreed with my parents – somehow practicing gave me the time and space to solve puzzles and sort things out emotionally.

There is a very high percentage of people in health care who had musical training as children – higher than the national average. And many of us continue to play our instruments. My colleagues who study the neuroscience of music are uncovering so many of the benefits of that early training: in helping develop resilience, perspective, grit, flexibility and creativity – all things we need as physicians.

There are many tools we developed through music that we can apply to medicine: the skills we use in learning a new piece of music are many of those we also use when considering a new challenging diagnosis – from processing data, to scaffolding (relying on and adapting prior knowledge), to finding patterns, to synthesizing the information.

Perhaps the most critical skill we learn as musicians that we use as physicians is flexibility and creativity within an established set of rules. No two performances are ever the same, even if the notes are the same. Similarly, no patient manifests her disease the same way, even if the lab values are identical. The variability and variation are what keeps us going and keeps us all interested.

We know how music is healing to patients and communities. It is also healing to the healers. My message to early-career physicians is: Don’t give up your music! Don’t give up your creative self. You may find that your relationship to music and to your instrument has to change, with the demands on your time in medical training, starting a family and maintaining a career. I still remember finding time to play duets with another pediatric resident in the middle of the night in the NICU – little moments, but healing for the two of us, as well as the NICU nurses – and maybe the preemies as well! Give yourself a break – try to carve out even brief musical moments, from revisiting some old favorite pieces, or even learning a new piece, measure by measure. You’ll be glad you did.

You’ve played a leading role in the Longwood Symphony Orchestra, a remarkable model of community-based healing through the arts. What lessons from that work have influenced how you care for patients?

Longwood Symphony Orchestra, the orchestra of Boston’s medical community, was started in the early 80s. It’s been my musical home for my entire career – now nearly 40 years – as a violinist and now as a violist.

I served as its president from 1991-2012. The orchestra was always interested in striving for excellence, first in music but then equally in its mission to heal
the community. Very early on, we decided that each concert should be a benefit for a medical non-profit organization in greater Boston. What we learned was that our most meaningful and powerful collaborations with the Community Partners have come from deep caring and deep listening – by empowering each organization and giving it agency to achieve its goals. I This is the best way to care for patients as well – the lab values and physical exam are helpful only after deeply listening to the patient.

As someone who teaches at Harvard Medical School, how do you see the role of the arts and humanities in shaping future physicians?

The art of healing is just that – an ART. As we have moved closer to tech and STEM, this has become lost. I’m not sure if categorizing such essential traits as empathy and listening as “Soft Skills” was helpful to medical education! In 2018 the Assn. of American Medical Colleges (AAMC) established the FRAHME initiative which endorses the arts and humanities as an essential part of medical education, stating “Arts and humanities are essential to the human experience and their benefits to medical education go far beyond joys and pleasures. By integrating arts and humanities throughout medical education, trainees and physician learn to be better observers and interpreters; and build empathy, communication and teamwork skills, and more.” (https://www.aamc.org/about-us/mission- areas/medical-education/frahme)

Your book Scales to Scalpels explores how music can heal both patients and caregivers. What inspired you to write it, and how has its message evolved over time?

Scales to Scalpels: Doctors who Practice the Healing Arts of Music and Medicine was written in 2012 as a valentine to the Longwood Symphony Orchestra after my 21 years as president. My hope was that it would serve as a blueprint for other medical musicians as they created their own ensembles, and I’ve been very gratified that that vision has come true. Our way of supporting medical nonprofits through empowerment remains a unique model of collaboration. While LSO was certainly not the first orchestra of medical professionals, I do think it helped catalyze the movement – Over the past 25 years we’ve seen scores of new musical ensembles in medical schools and medical centers across the country.

You’ve spoken about the importance of listening – both in music and in medicine. How can young doctors cultivate that kind of deep, attentive listening in a high-pressure clinical environment?

Deep listening and deep looking are skills we need to constantly cultivate, especially in these times where we can easily fill silence with sounds and sights from our ever-present devices. In pediatrics and education, I encourage my parents to allow their children to be “bored” – it is in that silence that creativity can grow.

Were there any pivotal mentors, patients, or musical moments that shifted how you understand healing?

Early on it was my piano teacher who would challenge me to understand not just what I was playing on a technical level but why and how. “Does this passage sound sad? Angry? Can you make this sound happy? Does this music bounce?” Much later as a pediatrician, parent and teacher, I realized the value of those simple directives. Through music, children are given the chance to learn abstract concepts and to nonverbally express emotion.

There was an experience that stands out to me. Several years ago we brought a string quartet of medical students to a hospital school – the students there were aged 8-44 but had cognitive levels of less than 2 years old. Most were nonverbal and many were non- ambulatory. We played for the students, their caregivers and their parents, then asked for observations following the performance. Some parents and caregivers were surprised at how their students responded to music (“I didn’t know he could hear that!” “I haven’t seen him so happy!”). Some nurses and staff noticed that they themselves felt better after the music. And the medical students noticed that playing challenged their pre-conception of this patient population.

What gives you hope right now – either in medicine, the arts, or both?

What gives me hope in medicine and the arts is my unshakeable belief that it is in our core human nature to aspire to good, beauty and justice. That is what drives us to seek knowledge, care for patients, pursue self-expression through the arts and improve our community. There is so much despair right now. The arts and holding on to beauty can help us counteract this and prevent burn out. So often it is a struggle to embrace hope – but knowing that we are not alone in this struggle helps. And in the end, it is art, beauty and knowledge that will survive.

Is there a project, piece of music, or idea you’re currently working on that you’d like to share with our readers?

I’m passionate about arts education across the educational and health spectrum. Besides the arts organizations I work with, I devote a lot of time to arts education in the Pre-K through 12 space. I’m on the boards of the BPS [Boston Public Schools] Arts Initiative and the Conservatory Lab Charter School that ensure that children in Boston have access to the arts. All children should have access to quality arts education. Creating art and playing music are good for them neurologically and neurodevelopmentally: it takes them away from screens and computers and promotes fine motor and gross motor coordination. Promoting the arts in young children teaches them resilience, collaboration and creativity. As we discussed, these are the skills people need to be successful in life – the earlier the seeds are planted, the better. These are where our empathetic, creative citizens will come from – and our next physicians as well.

Lisa Wong, MD

Associate Co-Director and Co-Founder of the Arts and Humanities Initiative, Harvard Medical School, Assistant Professor of Pediatrics, Massachusetts General Hospital

Dr. Lisa Wong is an assistant professor of pediatrics at Harvard Medical School, arts education advocate, and co-director of the Arts and Humanities Initiative at HMS. A violist and practicing pediatrician at Milton Pediatric Associates, she served as president of the Longwood Symphony Orchestra for 21 years, where she co-designed its signature “Healing Art of Music Program.” During the Covid-19 pandemic, she helped create Boston Hope Music, offering virtual music performances to patients and healthcare workers. Dr. Wong teaches a course on music, health, and education at Harvard College and co-leads a museum-based medical education fellowship through Harvard Macy Institute. She serves on the boards of Conservatory Lab Charter School, A Far Cry, and chairs the BPS Arts Expansion initiative. Nationally, she contributed to the NASEM committee on arts in STEMM education and serves on the Neuroarts Blueprint scientific committee. Dr. Wong is the author of Scales to Scalpels: Doctors Who Practice the Healing Arts of Music and Medicine.

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