Instrumental Healing
 |
|
|
The Charness Family Quintet has produced five CDs.
Photo courtesy of Michael E. Charness, M.D.
|
|
Charness focuses on ailments afflicting musicians.
Like professional athletes, musicians sometimes play through pain. Unlike most athletes, however, many musicians don’t know how to avoid injury or obtain treatment for playing-related maladies—the pinched nerves, strained muscles, tendinitis, and other afflictions that are caused or exacerbated by the repetitive movement and awkward positioning required to make an instrument sing.
Michael Charness ’76, founder and director of the Performing Arts Clinic at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, is one of the country’s leading specialists in a relatively young field that focuses on fixing—and avoiding—such ailments.
Charness—a professor of neurology and faculty associate dean for Veterans Hospital Programs at the Harvard Medical School, assistant dean at Boston University School of Medicine, and chief of staff of the VA Boston Healthcare System—has spent the past 20 years specializing in the care of instrumental musicians with hand problems.
A pianist since childhood, Charness continued playing classical music during his medical student days at Hopkins, often practicing at nearby Peabody Conservatory. As a neurology resident at University of California, San Francisco, he practiced up to three hours daily—and began to notice his hands becoming less responsive. Neurology colleagues couldn’t find anything wrong. Fortunately, a neurosurgeon in Charness’s chamber music trio diagnosed bilateral ulnar nerve entrapments—a condition that non-musician neurologists wouldn’t necessarily suspect. He operated successfully on Charness to fix it in 1984.
"I became interested in the fact that musicians can be disabled by very mild neuromuscular impairment," recalls Charness. "Within a few years, I was seeing musicians from all parts of the country, still at the back of my lab at UCSF," he recalls. "It wasn’t until I moved to Boston in 1989 that I was able to establish a clinic in a separate location."
Over the past two decades, Charness has treated several thousand musicians who have played everything from double basses to bagpipes. And music has remained an important part of his own life. He and wife Deborah Nathan, a professional flutist, have raised three highly accomplished musician children. Beginning in 1993, they performed as the Charness Family Quintet—with Sarah, now 24, and Jenny, 19, on violin; Daniel, 22, on cello; Deborah on flute, and Charness at the piano. They’ve produced five CDs of their work (www.charnessfamily.net).
"We used to perform about 20 concerts per year until the kids grew up and moved away," Charness says. "We continue to perform in various combinations about a half dozen times per year, but the logistics are very challenging."
Neil A. Grauer |
