With little hope of her complete recovery, doctors of SCB Medical College, Cuttack, on Saturday started providing music therapy to a Pipili gangrape victim.
Doctors hope the 19-year-old girl, who is an avid music lover and emerging singer, will respond to the therapy and recover.
The decision to provide music therapy was taken after consultations with Dr Bhabani Shankar Das, former director of National Institute of Mental Health and Neuro Sciences (NIMHANS), Bengaluru, and super-specialists at AIIMS, New Delhi, said hospital superintendent D.N. Mohapatra.
As per the decision, the hospital authorities played in slow-pitch devotional songs dedicated to Lord Jagannath and Lord Shiv, a few songs that she used to sing, besides voices of her parents and relatives.
Mr Mohapatra informed that a senior doctor from VSS Medical College Hospital in Burla was hired to oversee the music therapy.
A 13-member super-specialist team of the SCB Medical College Hospital in Cuttack is monitoring the condition of the girl who was gangraped on November 28, 2011. The four accused, who were arrested this week after nationwide protests, had even tried to strangle her. The specialist team is video-recording the response of the girl to the therapy.
The former NIMHANS director, Dr Das, who had examined the girl on Friday, found a slight improvement in her condition and hoped that musical therapy could help further.
“Although appropriate treatment is being provided to the girl at the hospital in Cuttack, she has remote chances of getting fully cured,” Dr Das observed.
The girl, from Arjungada village under Pipili area in Puri district, slipped into a coma after she was gangraped, though she can now be stated to be in a semicomatose stage.