Musicians with Dystonia Bulletin Board

For once I disagree with you :-)

I don't have 'generalised dystonia'. I have a control malfunction that relates directly to the way I approached my instrument, an occupational injury.

If I didn't play guitar, or more importantly had approached it differently, the problem would not have arisen. Changing the way I approached things has led to recovery. You don't recover from generalised dystonia by changing your approach to things any more than you recover from Parkinsons disease. Many musicians actually report being BETTER when they recover from FD.

IMO it is very unfortunate that the term 'focal dystonia' ever became the term used to describe what we as musicians experience with this condition, as we inherit all the neurological baggage associated with generalised dystonia - brain disease that cannot be cured, etc.

It was a case of - "Oh it looks like an unwanted muscular contraction, we have a name for that..."

One of the most interesting studies in the literature (reported by Nancy Byl, see link below), but rarely mentioned, is the one where monkeys were forced to peform repetitive grasping tasks under duress and eventually showed sypmtoms of FD. This was backed up by brain scans afterwards, showing the tell tale smudging of the areas controling the digits afterwards.

In other words, the FD was a direct result of the monkey's physical - and presumably emotional/psychological - behaviour.

Here we have a neurologist - actually one of the world's leading experts in musician's FD - clearly referrring to FD as an occupational injury, something that results directly from behaviour:

http://www.neurology.org/cgi/content/abstract/47/2/508

IMO if Nancy Byl could only undertake cross discipline work and work with people who better understand the psychological/emotional component, she would get closer to a model that predicts the onset of FD, and from a scientific perspective provides a reliable basis for therapy.

This will come. At some point the numbers of people coached back to recovery by people like Farias and Fabra will just get so big that the broader scientific community will have to take notice.