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Fort Smith hospital uses music to alleviate pain

May 17, 2013

The staff at Sparks Regional Medical Center tries to alleviate their patients' pain in a variety of ways — including through the power of music, thanks to a local volunteer.
David Bruce, 65, spends his afternoons as a hospital volunteer playing hymns on his diatonic harmonicas to staff and patients alike in the main entrance, in hallways and in patients' rooms. He learned the hymns, which fill up two thick, three-inch music books that he carries around the hospital along with his harmonicas, when he attended First United Methodist Church in Fort Smith with his parents as a child.