Musculoskeletal Problems in Performers

The interesting article on musculoskeletal problems in pianists by Moñino et al. in the June issue raises some of the “physician’s dilemmas” in their approach to performing arts medicine, in all areas of diagnosis, prevention, and performer education. The authors have been able to transfer the disorders observed in their pianists from the largely unhelpful “PRMD” label to more “objective” categories by giving them an ICD-10 classification. This helps to group them more rationally, but the categories identified for the greater number of problems remain, as might be expected, symptomatic (e.g., M54.2 cervicalgia) and not specific “disease” categories. Over half of the pianists’ problems fell within ICD-10 categories which are non-specific.