Musicians with Dystonia Bulletin Board

Here are some things I've been thinking about that might be related:

For ages I did exercises that didn't help. I think this might've been because those exercises only really used the muscles that were already strong whereas the exercises that I switched to at the beginning of last year forced me to start using the neglected muscles. They also forced me to improve my proprioception. The exercises I'm doing now pick out the individual muscles which makes it pretty obvious which ones are weak.

When I watch other people play I quite often see movements that look like scaled-down versions of my dystonic movements. I think it's likely that a lot of people have similar problems that have just never become bad enough to be a noticeable, separate issue. I imagine that before it all developed into a serious issue I probably had similar little problems that never got in the way enough for me to be forced to notice them or do something about them specifically (like Clive's plinking noise).

Using a muscle often seems to affect neighbouring muscles either by making them compensate (ie move in an opposite direction, like a pinky sticking up when the other fingers of the hand are holding a cup of tea) or by co-tensing (like when your back goes out - one muscle goes into spasm so a neighbouring muscle tries to take over but isn't up to the task which results in pain). I teach adult students cello a couple of nights a week and I quite often see a student's whole hand and wrist and even shoulder tense up because they're trying so hard to hold a string down. Maybe FD is just something like that in an exaggerated form.

For ages I had fine tremors in my fingers. I read somewhere that 50% of dystonics have them. Maybe this was because there was some small muscle in the finger musculature that was too weak and was being overworked.

I was watching a video of a lecture that Altenmuller gave at a piano conference and he said at the beginning that the main difficulty in piano playing isn't getting the fingers to move the right way but is rather stopping the other fingers from moving at the same time. Maybe FD is partly the result of continually trying to disinhibit muscles - we spend so long trying to relax and not make co-tensing/compensatory movements that a nerve connection or small muscle eventually atrophies to the point where it becomes a problem.

Clive, I was interested to read about the exercise Candia suggested where you move your finger as if you were sliding it under a piece of paper. If I've got what you were saying right that sounds like exactly the movement that's controlled by one of the small intrinsic muscles I was talking about (the lumbrical). It's also the movement that my ring finger used to make if my middle finger was holding a key down and I tried to lift my ring finger - instead of the finger lifting from the knuckle it would straighten out (sort of like the finger in this video only straightening above the key, not into it and straightening much more than this: http://www.musicandhealth.co.uk/movies/IO.swf). It'd be interesting to know whether Candia was trying to get you to work that muscle or just trying to get you to move the finger in a different way.