Musicians with Dystonia Bulletin Board

I've been having a lot of success retraining my fingers with exercises that involve using tension (ie excessive force in opposing muscles) to force my fingers to move without the extraneous dystonic movements. This seems to build up the neural connections and/or muscle strength to the point where I can eventually go back to playing without the tension and the dystonic movements will be lessened. The advice I've found on this board has been to exercise below the point at which the dystonic movements kick in which is something I never thought of. It always seemed to me that my nerves and muscles needed to be built up to counter the problem rather than coming at it from the other side.

Here's some background to my dystonia and some details about the exercises I've been using.
I learnt piano as a child then started playing cello when I was 19. I had quite a passion for the cello and developed quickly and was playing concertos with amateur orchestras by the time I was in my mid-twenties and started thinking about having some proper lessons (up til then I was mostly self-taught) and possibly having a career as a cellist.

At around 31 or 32 I started to notice problems with co-ordination in my left hand and I started doing exercises (mostly Hanon piano exercises) to try and deal with it. I did these assiduously for about 5 years. It didn't improve the problem but it did help me work out exactly what the main problems were - my left middle finger was curling into my palm involuntarily whenever I used my left ring finger and I'd also developed compensating movements where my left index, ring and little fingers would extend when I flexed the left middle finger. The problem got progressively worse to the point where I could only play a left-hand C major scale on the piano very slowly and with great difficulty and even the cello part to Pachelbel's Canon was starting to be a problem (since the problems started I have mostly worked as a gigging cellist - weddings/functions etc).

At the start of 2008 (around my 38th birthday) I changed the exercises I was doing and instantly started seeing improvements. I switched to exercises that involved holding a piano key down while playing with the other fingers (based on the exercises by Dohnanyi). For a long time I could only do these very slowly and with a great deal of tension but after 6 or 9 months I started being able to do them without the tension. Since then I have gradually worked out the kinks by doing the exercises with tension to build up the nerve connections and muscles and also playing without the tension to see what other glitches still need ironing out (and to make sure that I don't build up a habit of playing with tension) and although it is not yet completely gone it does feel like there is an end in sight and that sometime soon I should be able to play without any dystonic movements at all.

I've built up a raft of theories about how the problem started (new instrument, heavy reliance on automatic movements etc) and why these exercises have worked (sensory cortex and kinaesthesia needing to be retrained before exercises will work etc) which I would be happy to discuss more fully if anyone is interested.

A few years after the problem started I read an article about Leon Fleisher. I remember thinking that it sounded similar to my problem but I think I put it out of my head because the article basically said fd was incurable. At the end of last year I heard about a violinist friend with fhd who had symptoms similar to mine. I looked up fd online, read some articles and then went to a physio here in Sydney, Australia, who specialises in musicians and particularly in fd. She confirmed fhd and suggested that I continue with the exercises (I'd been worried that the tension might be dangerous but she thought the forces produced by opposing muscles were unlikely to be a risk) and gave me some of the tactile exercises that seem to be commonly suggested (reading Braille etc) which I did for a short while.