What is Musician’s Focal Dystonia?
Dystonia is a movement disorder originating in the central nervous system where a person has sustained or intermittent involuntary muscle contractions that can affect one or more parts of their body, causing abnormal movements and postures.
There are several types of dystonia, classified according to the affected body region. For more information on the different types of dystonia, you can read my blog post: What is muscular dystonia?
Focal dystonia is a type of dystonia that affects a muscle or group of muscles in a specific part of the body.
Musician’s focal dystonia belongs to a special group of dystonias called Occupational Dystonia, also known as Task-Specific Focal Dystonia.
Occupational Dystonias are triggered by repetitive motor activity closely related to a person’s professional task. In the particular case of musicians, this task is playing their own instrument.
It develops gradually and progressively.
The two most common types of occupational dystonia in musicians are:
Focal hand dystonia: This is characterized by involuntary contractions occurring in some of the fingers, lack of coordination between some of them, slowness in certain movements, tremors, and spasms in a particular finger, the wrist, or the forearm.
Oromandibular dystonia: This affects wind instrumentalists. It is also known as embouchure dystonia. It causes spasms in the muscles of the jaw, lips, and tongue, affecting the correct shape the mouth should adopt when playing the instrument.
Musicians are especially vulnerable to this type of task-induced dystonia, which is characterized by the appearance of involuntary muscle contraction, with no pain, and is associated with the loss of motor control in highly trained movements during musical performance.
What’s curious is that in most cases, as soon as the instrument is put down, the muscles relax.
After years of practice developing high skill on the instrument, suddenly finding that all that has vanished can be devastating, as well as inexplicable. For this reason, dystonia seems like a mysterious illness.
It takes time to accept this condition and even longer to understand what it is.
At first, all our attention is focused exclusively on observing the symptoms, against which there is nothing we can do. This situation causes enormous frustration that can cause significant emotional damage and also seriously affect us financially, if our profession as performers is our means of support.
The saddest and most distressing thing is that we can spend years like this if we don’t truly understand what lies behind the symptom, because actually the symptom is only the physical representation of the condition and not the condition itself.
For this reason, it’s so difficult to overcome dystonia without the help of someone who has suffered from this condition and recovered, of someone who has gone through the same questions and frustrations, of someone who has learned to see beyond the symptom and, above all, to feel beyond the symptom.
Only when we learn to approach dystonia from a holistic perspective do we discover that it’s possible to effectively treat it.
Symptoms in right-handed guitarists
Right Hand
- Very slow movement recovery of one of the fingers after plucking a string.
- Fingers that curl inward involuntarily.
- A feeling of weakness in one finger.
- Tremors, spasms, or involuntary contraction of one or more fingers.
- Lack of coordination of the fingers.
- Lack of independence between some fingers.
- One finger contracts (dystonic movement), and another tries to compensate by extending or contracting (compensatory movement).
- Spasms in the fingers, wrist, or forearm when bringing the hand closer to the strings.
Left Hand
- One finger is triggered with excessive force on the fingerboard.
- Difficulty lifting a finger from the fingerboard.
- Fingers that involuntarily curl toward the palm and set below the fingerboard.
- Feeling of weakness in one finger.
- Tremors, spasms, or involuntary contraction of one or more fingers.
- Lack of finger coordination.
- Lack of independence between some fingers.
- One finger contracts (dystonic movement), and another tries to compensate by extending or contracting (compensatory movement).
