12/11/2025
The Future of Healing
Sound therapy, many experts say, is at the cutting edge of healing.
Using the human voice and objects that resonate to stimulate healing (think tuning forks and singing bowls), sound therapy is one of a growing number of subtle-energy therapies that make up the field of vibrational medicine. According to the law of physics, everything vibrates: the chair youโre sitting in, the food you eat, the rocks and trees.
โWhether or not we hear it, everything has a sound, a vibration all its own,โ writes Joshua Leeds in The Power of Sound (Healing Arts Press, 2001).
That sound is called resonance, the frequency at which an object naturally vibrates. Each part of our bodies has its own natural resonance, and vibrational medicine is based on the idea that disease is a result of those natural resonances getting out of tune โ whether due to stress, illness or environmental factors.
But does it work? Yes, say sound therapists, who have successfully treated everything from stress to Parkinsonโs disease to hormonal problems. Jonathan Goldman, director of the Sound Healers Association in Boulder, Colo., has seen tuning forks alleviate many maladies, including headaches and misaligned vertebrae. Diรกne Mandle, a certified sound healer in Encinitas, Calif., uses Tibetan singing bowls to bring her clientsโ bodies back in tune.
In her article โSound Healing With Tibetan Bowls,โ first published by the Holistic Health Network, Mandle writes that her clients have experienced โrelief from pain and discomfort, clearing of sinuses, shifting out of depression, [improved] ability to sleep . . . , revitalization and clarity, feeling of well-being, great connectedness, and deep personal transformation.โ
Stress hormones decrease under these conditions, which is good news for everyone, but especially for people with a serious illness. Thatโs one reason Mitchell Gaynor, MD, an oncologist and assistant clinical professor at Cornell Universityโs Weill Medical College in New York, uses singing bowls with his cancer patients. Gaynor sees sound as part of a broader trend toward the humanization of medicine in which the whole person, not just the part thatโs broken, is addressed.
โI believe that sound can play a role in virtually any medical disorder, since it redresses imbalances on every level of physiologic functioning,โ he writes in his book The Healing Power of Sound: Recovery from Life-Threatening Illness Using Sound, Voice and Music(Shambhala, 1999).
-Karen Olson
