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Musicians' Hands and Other Instrumentalists' Problems by Dr. Arlo Gordin

One of the most specialized areas of my practice has been in fixing musicians’ problems.  This has included some of the best and most respected players in the world of music.  From guitarists, drummers and bassists to violinists, pianists and saxophonists, musicians require a level of dexterity, control, speed, and nimbleness that few equal.  A player cannot perform at his best if he has pain, numbness, lack of control, or similar problems.  These types of problems can threaten your career, and mess with your mind.  Many times I’ve had players who were stopped from playing at all.  For some, the severity was so great that they were despondent about losing their ability to pursue their love of music.  I’ve felt for those who have been so plagued, and have been most jazzed to have helped so many return to their art and their love.  Most have told me that before coming to me, every other doctor and treatment they'd tried had failed.

 

Every day I treat new patients with problems in the hands, fingers, thumbs, wrists, forearms, elbows, upper arms, shoulders or neck.  These can come as a single limited area of pain, numbness or weakness, or in combinations.

 

My reputation in this area of health restoration is so great that many musicians in the L.A. area have heard of my success, and know friends who have been fixed by me. Many others travel from great distances to receive care from me.  I get calls from people suffering with these problems from New York to Tokyo. I have treated musicians from most all continents and nations, from Europe to Asia to South America.  Function of hands and arms is a key aspect of most players’ lives.  

 

Most of the problems musicians bring me actually come from problems in their nerves and  joints. The clue that the problems are usually from nerves is the type of symptoms that are caused.  Pain comes from nerves. Numbness comes from nerves. Parts that won’t function normally and rapidly usually are almost never damaged muscles, but are failures of nerves to control the muscles and signal to and from them properly. Joint malfunction plays a key role in most nerve malfunctions. The rich and complex interplay of nerve signals telling your brain where every part of your arm and hands are precisely located and doing, and the outflow of nerve information telling the muscles and even blood flow control nerves to your arteries what they need to be doing NOW is nothing short of AMAZING.

 

To understate the matter, your system of nerve control is unimaginably complex and detailed. Your body devotes a tremendous amount of your brain and nerves to the job of controlling your hands, arms, fingers, etc.  And for this reason, doctors find that this is not the simplest area to understand and treat successfully.

 

It’s therefore no big surprise that most doctors, even chiropractors and acupuncturists are not well-versed in dealing with these conditions. Nearly all are unable to even test or diagnose them effectively.  The medical tools for diagnosis are most frequently served with an off-the-cuff-guessagnois.  The somewhat traumatic tool of inserting needle electrodes to see which muscles or nerves aren't electrically intact are, in our humble opinion, barbaric, and prove to be unnecessary. Add to that, the information generated on those tests almost never creates an applicable approach to curing or eliminating the pain, numbness or lack of control or endurance in playing.  You may often, at best, hope for a nice latin translation into medical diagnostic terminology which gives you back nothing but what you just explained to the specialist were your symptoms!  Tendinitis, repetitive stress injury, carpal tunnel syndrome, all impressive sounding names.  Now go wear this brace or take this drug, or we'll cut on you in a surgery.  So pray that those things bring you temporary relief, and pray again that it lasts a month or a year! 

 

Effective methods of understanding and correcting are not taught in medical professional schools.  Yes they've given your problem a name that sounds fancy, but when they really don’t know what is causing it, or generally even where the problem starts from in your body, they can't fix it. Even most “hand specialists” still only offer anti-inflammatory or pain killing nerve-doping drugs (just a cover-up and temporary), cortisone (dangerous and destructive in long term use), braces (of slim usefulness), and surgeries (with very patchy odds of improvement or cure). No wonder most musicians with such problems can be driven to desperation.

 

The development and use of techniques that analyze WHAT exactly is the problem, WHERE exactly is it caused, and most important WHAT NEEDS TO BE DONE TO FIX IT is a major breakthrough for musicians.  Where are the circuits shorted out?  Exactly?  Whether they start in your neck (where all nerves to shoulder, arm, hand and fingers must pass), the  multiple possible problem areas of shoulder system, elbow system, wrist system, or even in the fingers or thumbs, the tests I'll use will pinpoint the area(s) where the problem sources. You will find the muscle testing methods of identifying the exact problems you have aren't something you've probably seen before.  And the specific "adjustments" and treatments aren't either.  The use of ligament, joint, muscle and nerve repairing nutrition may be necessary to get both the quick improvement and the permanent fix you want and need for your artistry and your career.

 

I have more stories of success in this specialized niche of health care than either of us have time to recount. Easily coming to mind is an artist voted the best drummer in the world (and is in my book!) who called me with a hand problem so great that he didn't think he could take the stage for a show that night.  One treatment and he played effortlessly and painlessly that evening. Credit these superb and accurate Advanced Applied Kinesiology techniques for such a great and immediate response.

 

The return of players to the instruments they love, to play without pain, symptom or interference is a great satisfaction to me.  My office is full of success stories and thank you letters from the musicians who have benefited from our research and spot-on delivery of correction.  Numerous of the greatest and most reputable player magazines have done feature articles on me and my work with musicians:  Guitar Player, Guitar for the Practicing Musician, Bass Player, Modern Drummer, Keyboards.  Not because I had a publicist working for me; I didn't and don't.  These mags sent their journalists out to interview and write on my work helping their players only because players and celebs I had helped told them they'd best do so and so do a favor to their reading public.

 

Other problems too can affect musicians. Drummers and other instrumentalists often have back and spine problems, from the way they sit and play, or from lifting their gear. The neck is often an important area to be analyzed and corrected in many hand and wrist conditions.  Nerves to the hands and arm can be pinched in the neck, more often than not without the person even having a clue it’s there. Nutrition is often an important element in the fast correction of tough problems. I have fixed hands and wrists of people who already had carpal tunnel (even multiple surgeries!) or other surgeries for these exact problems, and those surgeries had failed.

 

Do you want to know more about this area of my specialized work than can be covered here?  On YouTube, go to Dr Arlo Gordin, and watch Musicians Hands, that covers this area quite completely. Or click here!

 

It’s my belief that you, our artists, deserve to create.  I understand how an arm or hand or finger that won't do what you need it to do can frustrate or nearly destroy you. I want you to know that the natural way is most often the best.  And I want you to get the job that you need done immediately and right.

Subluxation, Nerve Malfunction & Resulting Degeneration/Arthritis Effects on Your Health by Dr. Arlo Gordin

Your health is something natural.  You get it.  Somehow your body can turn a peanut butter and jelly sandwich into its cells and tissues.  It can heal a wound, rebuild itself, fight off an infection.  Scientists can observe that life is intelligent, responding appropriately to changes both inside and out.

Your nerve system is the one in charge of all of that. Of the trillion cells that make up your body, one out of every 15 cells is a nerve cell, whose job it is to carry information that senses and controls and coordinates all of life’s functions.  It is most crucial that your nerve system function properly, and has no interference to its electrical signals.

Certain things are needed for a healthy nerve system:  adequate rest and sleep, exercise, proper nutrition including correct minerals in your blood.  And other conditions that generate interference to nerve signals must be handled.  Subluxation is the chiropractic word for the nerve malfunctions, the "short circuits" that occur when the joints of the spine (or other joints) are displaced (sometimes minimally), and damaged (in the soft tissues:  ligaments, cartilages and spinal discs).  The result is a lack of healthy nerve signal transmission, resulting eventually in pain and in diseases from failing organs, because all your organs need healthy nerve signalling to function and do their jobs.

You have probably subluxated your spine multiple times in your life.  Falls, accidents, improper posture, sports injuries and lifting improperly are a few ways that a spine can get subluxated.  Some infants begin a sick life with subluxations from the pressures of the birth process itself.  You could try to live a life so inactive, never at risk of injury, that you’d never risk a subluxation.  But that wouldn’t be fun, and your muscles would be so weak for lack of exercise that they wouldn’t hold your spine in alignment, so you’d end up subluxated anyway.

You will hear my patients talk about their severe and chronic illnesses that were cured with effective chiropractic care:

Headaches Throat  conditions Bronchitis

Colitis, Constipation Migraines Laryngitis

Liver abnormalities Bladder infections Neck Pain

Shoulder, Arm, Elbow pain Gall bladder trouble Urinary tract disorders

TMJ (Jaw) pain Hand or wrist pain Digestive disorders

Chronic female pain Muscle spasms Carpal Tunnel Syndrome

Stomach pain Infertility Nervousness

Tendonitis Ulcers Decreased sex drive

Fatigue Numbness Hiatal Hernia

Low  back pain Dizziness Thyroid illness

Cardiac Illness Sciatica Depression

Asthma Immune deficiency Leg pain, numbness

Eye & Ear disorders Lung disease Skin Rashes

Knee problems Foot pain & many others

When you realize that subluxation causes dangerous interference to nerves and disrupts health, you can understand this broad range of conditions.

Subluxations are caused not only by physical trauma or misuse of your body.  Emotional stress, chemical, dietary, and organ aggravations result in nerve malfunctions and subluxation.  Some subluxations are true pinched nerves (especially spinal ones).  Others are nerve interferences to the many nerves within and around your joints (jaw, knee, hip, shoulder, wrist, etc.) that have problems (“proprioceptive nerves”) that carry vital signals to and from the brain.

Your subluxations can sometimes be seen visibly as misalignments.  But mostly they are not visible to the naked eye.  The pinching, stretching, or irritation to nerves is their first ill-effect.  Weakness or tightness and spasm of muscles adjacent to or served by those nerves often occurs.  Inflammation, pain and numbness can be one result.  Changes to the blood flow can cut off the lifeline to organs and tissues, because all arteries and blood delivery are controlled by correct nerve signals.  Resulting control errors of organs, and organ illnesses and breakdown, immune inadequacy and failure causes numerous diagnosed illnesses, whose causes are listed as “unknown” to medical science.

Spinal subluxations start in Phase 1 with spinal vertebral misalignments, some loss of normal spinal curves and nerve short-circuits and malfunctions.  Pain and other organ illness symptoms will start in Phase 1.  This is most commonly the phase of spinal malfunction in young people.  It demonstrates no degeneration yet.

Phase 2 Subluxation-Degeneration occurs when years of uncorrected subluxation have caused malformations and disc loss in your spinal vertebral joints.  Bone spurs (malformations and distortions that can look like a bird’s beak) on the vertebrae represent the beginning of pathological joint fusion.  Your spinal motion worsens; your spinal discs shrink and narrow, degenerate and begin to die.  This is the phase of degeneration and “arthritis”.  It has numerous names:  Osteoarthritis and Degenerative Joint Disease are two of them.  In Phase 2 the nerve problems worsen, as symptoms and illnesses will also do.  When I see your x-rays in Phase 2, I will grade your degeneration as to how far through Phase 2 they are.  For example if the area of your spine is 60% “gone” I will grade it as Phase 2.6It is important to know that you can slow and improve degeneration (Arthritis) of your spine with precision Chiropractic which restores motion where there is none, and state-of-the-art nutritional supplementation.

Phase 3 occurs as degeneration is finalizing and the spine has reached permanent joint fusion and chronic health failure.  At each Phase, 1, 2, and 3 the person gets worsening mobility in the spinal areas affected, and worsening health ill-effects from the increasingly short-circuited nerves to the areas muscles and organs of the body those nerves go to and from.

Detecting the location and specifics of your subluxations is the job of a doctor of chiropractic.  Using my Advanced Applied Kinesiology, the chiropractic specialty which developed muscle-testing as a diagnostic method, I can identify your subluxations accurately.  X-rays and other testing methods may be used to provide valuable information on your nerve and organ function.

My Advanced Applied Kinesiology's methods correct by application of precise chiropractic adjustments, in which the spine is restored to improved motion and position. This provides the amazing and precise method of correcting your subluxations.  It is a fact that how chronic (how much time you've had them) and how severe your problems are, the more work it takes to correct.  The process could be compared to straightening teeth, which also requires the correct amount of time and treatment.  Follow-through to complete the corrective phase of treatment is the best course of action.  When you are fully aware of the facts of subluxation-degeneration, doing a half-baked or temporary fix, only to have a problem return and worsen again, would not make the best sense to you.

By combining for you the most advanced chiropractic methods with nutritional and natural health expertise as I do in my clinic, stupendous results and my many “miracle” cases are made possible. 

I feel that people with nerve and spinal problems who haven't gotten to receive the benefit of high quality chiropractic and natural health care is like experiencing life before there were flush toilets or like a life without modern dentistry.  Sort of primitive, not so healthy and not very fun!

It is vital for you to understand the importance of nerves and your spine in your health, the integral role they and your glands play in running your entire well-being, and the importance of correcting subluxations that are quite universally sustained by all of us, to enjoy your life as optimally healthy.