HOLLAND, Mich. — A music therapy program for Parkinson's patients is being developed at a startup in Holland.
Theraplaying, set to launch in the fall, is a subsidiary of Sharp and Flat, a music technology company founded by James Lenger, a Hope College graduate.
The patented and certified twelve-week guitar program is designed to reduce tremors, improve coordination and balance and enhance the emotional well-being of Parkinson's patients, according to the Theraplaying website.
"I know what music meant to me," Lenger said in a Tuesday interview with FOX 17. "I think this is going to be something that will affect a lot of different people, and it will mean the world to them."
Ahead of the program's launch, Lenger is partnering with Hope College to study how music lessons affect the memory skills of people with Parkinson's disease.
Sharp and Flat has also previously collaborated with Michigan State University, Northwestern University, the University of Miami, and the Tokyo University of Technology for research purposes.
"He's driven and motivated and wants to make the world a better place," Nate Klooster, an assistant professor of psychology at Hope College, said about Lenger.
The study, which is supported by a research grant from the college, will take place in the summer and involve Hope students.
"Music is very complicated," Klooster said. "It requires visual feedback. It requires your auditory system. It requires moving your fingers and arms in a certain sequence. So, [playing] music is a great, complicated cognitive ability for any type of patient."
A retired medical doctor and Parkinson's patient, Brian Cote of Laketown Township is also assisting in the study and the launch of Theraplaying, in addition to taking guitar lessons from Lenger with the assistance of StrumPerfect, an attatchment from Sharp and Flat that helps beginners strum correctly.
"My symptoms began with the inability to write a sentence or two, but now I'm exercising those fine motor movements through strumming and picking a guitar," Cote said. "Who'd have guessed?"
In 2011, Cote was diagnosed with the disease. Working in the emergency room at the time, he realized "something had to change."
"The ER is full of stress and full of sleepless nights, two things that make [Parkinson's] worse," he said.
Cote switched to urgent care shortly after and continued to practice medicine until his retirement in 2019.
"I'm very thankful for that," he said about the slow onset of his Parkinson's symptoms. "I recognize it, and I'm determined to take advantage of that by doing things like this."
In addition to how the hobby protects and strengthens the body's fine motor skills and fights against the "freezing" characteristic of Parkinson's through rhythm, time spent learning to play guitar can give people purpose, too.
"There's an easy tendency to just become apathetic, to become depressed, to become anxious," Cote said about his diagnosis, also adding that caregivers play an instrumental role in the lives of Parkinson's patients. "I realized I had to find an enjoyable way to overcome that, and one way was to do that with music."
Theraplaying is in the process of receiving approval for its services to be billable to insurance and Medicare. Lenger says it should be completed within the next two months.
"This has been so fulfilling," he said. "This is a field in research that's fairly wide open right now, and we're discovering things that haven't been seen before."
