Musicians with Dystonia Bulletin Board

The image that takes much more than one word to describe was "trying to play a repetitive study or scale or arpeggio at full speed or even a slow but musical speed, with the malfunctions making it impossible to really do what you want, but straining to force the fingers to try to do it anyway".

In my experience, including talking to several other people, that is very dangerous (although as I described before I've done something that kinda looks and smells like that, but with a different state of mind and a focus on "feel" that brought some progress).
So, does anyone recommend *that* kind of fighting?

Regarding this item:
"2. ... i would curl the compensatories ...while picking a string ...and immediately flaring it ... it was a real fight to do all of this. i based many exercises on accentuating all of the opposite things from what dystonia wanted to do."

Were these mostly done at a slow speed?

I fully agree this can be useful. In my experience though, I found it important in the early stages to be careful to not do the same thing too long because it's so easy to produce lots of tension. And your #8 re "concentrated on relaxing" is critical IMHO; if you cannot start to feel a change or feel some progress in freeing up the movement, it can move into that "dangerous" category.

Here's one related thing I did to cure my ring finger from curling in when I plucked with the index:
Reach around with the left hand to touch the back of a's first phalanx. (It was also useful to pinch and hold the tiny hairs on the back of the finger). With all fingers hanging as loose as possible, press out with "a" against the LH as little as possible while ever so slowly asking "i" to approach the string. Depending on how well "a" can stay out, maybe i doesn't even touch the string yet; let it fall back out and repeat. The progression was to go from actively pressing outwards, countering the unwanted curling, towards just *feeling* the touch on the back of the finger, towards reducing the touch to the tiniest featherweight, to not touching at all.
Then there are all the nuances and variations; at first "i" was unsuccessful at all, but since plucking with m only barely influenced a, I started with m as kind of a model for i to follow.
When Pat O'Brien first showed me this kind of approach, he described it as using "reciprocal dennervation". There is a natural tendency when flexing one side of a joint for the opposite side to relax. So by extending the MP knuckle of "a" actively, it can help influence the flexors to let go. But of course the core malfunction of this brand of FD is a breakdown in that system, so it's a trick to feel your way through it.