Chiropratic Care for Performing Artists
By Mark Farmer
The show is in full swing. Costumed dancers twirl and leap across the stage.
A packed house sits enthralled as the traveling Broadway musical “Cats”
nears its climax.
Backstage, however, and unbeknownst to the audience, all is not well. A chiropractor,
on hand to adjust the cast and crew of the show, looks up and sees a woman in
full feline costume and makeup approaching him in a panic.
“She comes running down the hallway,” says Miami practitioner Spencer
Baron, “and she says, ‘Doc, doc, my throat is tightening up and
my neck is getting stiff. I can’t hit the notes. I have to be onstage
in less than five minutes.’ ”
As the seconds tick by, Baron works on the singer, getting her back into shape
to perform. When he finishes, she runs off toward the stage, but then stops,
turns and asks Baron if he’d like to come out and watch her sing. The
stage manager escorts Baron through the twists and turns of the theater out
into the auditorium.
“There are thousands of people in the theater,” Baron remembers.
“I suddenly recognize somebody onstage as the woman I just treated. It
turns out to be the woman who sings the song from ‘Cats’—‘Memory.’
I got tears and chills. It was one of top 10 most intense moments in my life.
I will never forget that.”
Whether as fans, former artists themselves, or simply practitioners seeking
to expand their practices, many doctors have elected to embrace the challenges
and garner the rewards of adjusting performers. How they get there can vary
widely. 
One pass to backstage can be through referral networks such as the Chiropractic
Council for the Performing Arts founded a decade ago by Dr. Richard Speizer
of Atlanta. The network numbers about 30 doctors from around the country and
works largely with itinerant Broadway shows.
Baron, who also works with the Miami Dolphins and Florida Marlins pro teams,
was a natural fit for the Council, he contends, given his keen interest in the
mechanics of injury and recovery. He believes that dancers often suffer more
than athletes from injury because they don’t have the latter’s highly
developed health support system.
Similar to Speizer’s network is a group listed on musicianshealth.com,
a web site posted by San Francisco-area chiropractor Timothy Jameson. After
starting the site four years ago to provide musicians with health information,
he began to hear from artists seeking care while on the road.
“I started to need chiropractors to refer to, and I found I needed a network,”
Jameson explains. “I want to get chiropractors more involved with the
local venues so it becomes more common for chiropractors to be part of the staff.
Through the network a lot of chiropractors have gotten new patients, which is
really cool. And, I don’t charge them anything for it, which is the best
part. It’s a labor of love. I do it for the benefit of our profession.”
Speizer says he formed his group after an initial contact with a Broadway show.
The network’s notoriety grew in the industry and eventually began to pay
off for the doctors.
“My name got around to many of the stage and company managers over the
years,” Speizer says. “At the Fox Theatre they send a call sheet
out to the shows ahead of time and it lists the local dentist and chiropractors
and massage therapists, and they list me.
“We put in several years of complimentary care for marketing [purposes],”
he said. Now he asks for the shows’ worker’s compensation or regular
insurance information before arranging as the doctor to work the show.
Likewise, Jameson believes an initial period of free care can open doors.
“One of the things I recommend to get into the venue is to volunteer for
a period of time,” he said. “I recommend starting with the crew,
and that gets you in the door. Once you develop a rapport, you can start charging.”
Speizer and Jameson each has his own qualifying criteria for membership.
“I get everybody’s [curriculum vita] and a copy of their malpractice
insurance,” Speizer said.
“There
are only two things I require,” Jameson said, “they have to be subluxation
based with some knowledge of extremity work as well. And, that they have an
avid interest in working with performers. I’ve turned down a number of
people who just want to be on a list.”
Other doctors find their way backstage as fans. Perhaps the ultimate example
may be New Haven, Conn., chiropractor Lester Licht. He volunteers his services
when he works at venues, occasionally receiving show passes in return.
Before chiropractic, Licht’s career revolved around the music industry.
He organized shows, and even worked on the cleanup crew after the original Woodstock
in 1969. (He laughs remembering what the crew found, or rather, didn’t
find: “Of all that stuff and half a million people, only one guy I know
found a wallet. Other than sleeping bags, either nobody owned anything or nobody
lost anything.”)
A few years ago, Licht happened to meet and adjust the founder of a famous local
club, as well as the production manager at another concert hall. These contacts
led to caring for crews and bands at those venues and ultimately adjusting The
Grateful Dead’s Bob Weir. As a lifelong Deadhead himself, Licht tells
the story of first meeting Weir with awe in his voice.
“Sitting way in the back is what has to be a Madame Tussaud’s wax
figure of Bob Weir, because it can’t possibly be Bob Weir,” he recalls.
The two ended up hitting it off, and now Licht adjusts the artist whenever he
plays the region.
On another occasion, Licht talked his way backstage at a Jefferson Starship
show having years earlier set up a gig for one of the band’s backing players.
He was only seeking an autograph, but wound up adjusting a singer on the spot.
He later gave each of the band members one of his chiropractic T-shirts, which
say “Chiropractic patients are well adjusted.” Licht has actually
seen the bassist, Jack Casady, wearing the shirt during performances.
Despite the understandable tendency to become star struck in the presence of
celebrities, Licht and other doctors stress the necessity to stay professional
at all times. In the case of Daniel Cohen, a chiropractor from Portsmouth, Va.,
his own years as a professional musician prior to becoming a chiropractor serve
him well. Cohen, who is listed in Jameson’s network, is a familiar figure
at a nearby 6,000-seat pavilion where he has adjusted the likes of Heart, Widespread
Panic, Nickelback and Ringo Starr.
“I think that it helped that I played for so long that I wasn’t
as star struck. Of course, I was a little taken back when Ringo walked into
the room,” he said. “It’s important to remember that when
you meet the performers that you know they’re not there for you, you’re
there for them.
“The most difficult part is dealing with the tour managers and road managers,”
Cohen continues. “You can’t go directly to the artist without dealing
with the tour manger. It would be very poor protocol.”
Jameson echoes this notion recalling when he adjusted Christian musician Steven
Curtis Chapman. “Before I could work on him, I had to work on his tour
manager and his production manager, and they had to give the go ahead that I
was OK.”
For every
Ringo Starr, Bob Weir or Broadway production cast, thousands of dancers, singers,
and musicians labor away at their craft without fame but with the same dedication
and chance of injury. For them, doctors like Jill Lile offer true empathy along
with a chiropractor’s healing hand. A former ballet dancer turned ballet
teacher turned chiropractor—a foot injury ended her career—she regularly
sees many dancers at her Minneapolis office, particularly during the year-end
holidays.
“I love the Christmas season because that’s when I get to see the
Nutcracker and the Snow Queen casts in my office. You can tell when they’re
intensively rehearsing.
“Its advantageous to be a chiropractor and still have your foot in the
other world too because you know what dancers are going through,” she
said.
Lile is also an acupuncturist, an expert at the Alexander technique, and has
had special training in dance injury prevention with the International Association
for Dance Medicine and Science.
“I do have a bag of tools depending on what’s going on with the
person,” she said. Because of her multi-discipline approach, Lile prefers
to see patients in her office rather than at rehearsal or performance sites
so that she can more effectively address the patients’ problems.
Baron, too, sometimes worries about the limits of adjusting on location and
so attempts to persuade performers to visit his office for a more thorough exam
as well as X-rays, if necessary. “That was a big issue for me,”
he says, “because the esteem I wanted chiropractic to convey was one of
sophistication and not just ‘crack and go.’ I would tell the performer,
‘I’m going to do an abbreviated exam on you. This is just to keep
you going.’”
Whatever path leads them to performers, doctors can face nettlesome challenges
with artists, including poor health habits, a life on the road, misinformation,
and repetitive injury.
Some musicians, for example, still indulge in that world’s legendary unhealthy
behavior.
“A lot of musicians are still into drugs and alcohol, and you have to
educate them about what they’re doing to their bodies,” Jameson
said. “They’re not going to hold any adjustment if they’re
getting wasted on the bus everyday.”
“Even the most famous people have the same sorts of misinformation and
misconception about chiropractic and they require the same kind of information
that anyone walking in off the street would get,” Cohen explains.
He often tries to reach musicians with an explanation of the body’s harmony
that they can relate to.
“One of the things I teach the musicians,” says Cohen, “is
that if you took the resonate frequencies of each individual spinal bone and
graphed out the ratios between each bone—the proportion is the exact same
ratio as the chromatic scale in Western music. I try to come to the artist as
not the old-fashioned horse-and-buggy back fixer, but as someone who can help
them understand the musicality of the their body and their life and how it relates.”
Cohen observes a difference between older and younger musicians in their acceptance
of healthier living. “Most of the more seasoned performers have already
done the drug and alcohol game, so now they’re taking care of themselves.
A lot of them come out and they’re doing yoga and exercises and meditating
before the shows.”
Licht sees this with Bob Weir, a former guitarist and singer for the Grateful
Dead now considered one of the most durable musicians working today.
“He’s been doing yoga consistently on a daily basis for many, many
years,” Licht said. “He was always the jock in the band. Bobby has
the most supple musculature of any human being I’ve ever palpated. The
guy is like butter. I do a lot of trigger point work; I couldn’t find
a trigger point on this guy—and I was looking.”
“Musicians are a different sort,” Jameson says, “performing
artists in general are very right brain. But also the problems are very specific
to the instrument they play or the type of arts that they’re in. Almost
every email I get from guitarists is about numbness in their fourth and fifth
finger and pain in the forearm. It’s a compression of the ulnar nerve.
It comes from fretting the guitar—putting your hand on the fretting board
and reaching out with that little finger.
“Sometimes you see neck and back problems with guitarists. I see it a
lot more with pianists, a lot of midback and carpal tunnel. Drummers, [have]
a lot of wrist problems, carpal tunnel and sometimes shoulders. But as a chiropractor,
I always look at the spine first. A lot of times if you clear the spine, the
arm will start clearing naturally.”
The set of Les Miserables itself once generated work for Baron. “The stage
is on a slant so the audience at the back can see everything,” he remembers.
“If you dropped something round it would actually roll into the orchestra
pit. We saw a lot of injuries—people were falling and spraining ankles.”
Baron
tries to counsel performers on general health if they will listen. “It
was pretty shocking that a lot of them smoke,” he says, recalling a show
titled Celtic Fusion, which was similar to Riverdance. “I couldn’t
believe what they do. They could almost hover [when they danced], and I see
them light up a cigarette in the green room. I tell them, ‘You’re
decreasing peripheral blood flow to the extremities. If you don’t provide
yourself with the maximum amount of nutrition to your muscles, you’re
going to end up injuring yourself.’”
Lile brings a dancer’s eye to her patients’ problems, and she looks
for ways to prevent them in the first place. “In performing, most problems
come from technical deficiencies,” she maintains. “If you do it
less than biomechanically perfect, you set yourself up for some problems. Very
few dancers get into their 30s and 40s without paying the price. The more you
can identify where the weaknesses are you can get to the problems before they
get to you.” With younger dancers she sees ankle injuries, while with
age comes more knee, hip, feet, and low back complaints.
Lile’s background also gives her a special insight into the psyche of
her patients. A curious dichotomy emerges regarding dancers’ receptiveness
to care plans.
“We’re talking about a part of the population that doesn’t
have a lot of money and they are really acute care people,” she says.
“Some are willing to follow a care plan, but most just want what’s
broken to be fixed.”
On the other hand, she says, “For the general population, if you give
them exercises and can get them to do it once a month, it’s good. For
dancers, you have to tell them to do it five times less. Pain is not an issue.”
Provide
your feedback on this article.
© Copyright 2003 Today's Chiropractic