Musicians with Dystonia Bulletin Board

1. As I mentioned earlier, it would be really interesting to know what kind of success he has had coaching people with FD. He's been doing this for years and must have seen dozens of people so he should have a reasonable idea of how effective his methodology is, in terms of the percentage of people that recover.

2. Secondly, I am having trouble reconciling what he says with basic anatomy and indeed with what he does himself when he plays. For a healthy technique I understand how important it is to be conscious of the whole body and in particular using large muscle groups where possible, but he goes a lot further than this and claims that it is possible to learn to play the guitar using only the large muscles of the upper arm.

It is anatomically impossible to flex and extend the fingers without engaging the forearm flexors and extensors, and his description of playing the strings corresponds with yours - eg using the biceps and triceps to move the arm at the elbow joint to move the fingers through the strings as required, presumably with the finger joints themselves in a fixed position.

This is all well and good at slow speeds and I can see it would be a great way to 'get going' if you have FD to re-educate the whole sensory-motor system, but surely he sees that a some point you have to start actually flexing and extending the finger joints? If not, the simplest of movements eg P-I alternation would require the whole arm bobbing up and down like mad. What about chords where P opposes the fingers and they are played together - the arm cannot move in two directions (up and down) at the same time?

The idea makes no sense and if you watch this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gnB4s0-bPA