The Effect of Listening to Quran During Cesarean Section on Postoperative Pain

Postoperative pain management is crucial for surgical patients. Management of postoperative pain entails reducing painful symptoms, improving the quality of recovery and resuming normal daily living activities. In addition to the benefits derived from relieving postoperative pain in women undergoing cesarean section, prolonged immobility as a result of pain during puerperium is associated with risk of thromboembolic disease.

Postoperative pain has negative physiological and psychological impact on patients' well-beings and delays the postoperative recovery. Pain may also impair the mother's ability to provide an optimal care for her infant in the immediate postpartum period. Besides that, it also reduces the maternal ability to breast-feed her infant effectively.

Effective pain relief should not interfere with the mother's ability to move around and care for her infant, and that it results in no adverse neonatal effects in breast-feeding women.

Non-pharmacological techniques for reduction of pain are growing rapidly. Spiritual intervention with listening to Quran recitations as an adjunctive therapy in the postoperative period is a non-pharmacological technique that is inexpensive, non-invasive and has no side-effects. Spiritual and Islamic implication could improve postoperative pain 6-8 hours and 24-30 hours in Muslim patients undergoing abdominal surgery. However, there is limited number of published studies on the effect of spiritual and religious intervention on pain after cesarean section.

Listening to Quran recitation elicits a relaxation response of calmness, mindfulness, and peacefulness in Muslims. Pray therapy results in optimal harmonization, which improves psychological, social, spiritual, and physical health status.

The current study aims to investigate the effects of listening to Quran recitation on pain intensity among patients after cesarean section according to the cultural, social and economic differences in Egypt.