A Tempo · Return to the original speed Treatment for musicians who need their playing back, not just their pain gone.
- Daniel Su, MD
- RMSK
- CIPS
- Physiatrist & cellist
- Tainan, Taiwan
Relieving pain is where treatment starts, not where it finishes. What matters to a musician is finger speed, endurance, control, articulation, and walking onto a stage confident that the instrument will do what you ask of it. That is what this clinic is built around.
As a cellist, I know we need a healthier environment for performing artists. As a doctor, I know I can bring key medical knowledge into the performing world.
The clinic
- Based at
- Chi Mei Medical Center, Tainan
Dept. of Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation
- Sessions
- Tue 18:00–21:00
Thu 14:00–17:00
Fri 09:00–12:00
- Enquiries
- [email protected]
- From abroad
- First trip is usually 3 days to 1 week, including your first treatment
And yes — you can usually keep playing during recovery.
This is the first question almost every musician asks, and the answer is not the one they expect. Treatment here is planned around your instrument and your concert schedule, not around telling you to stop. What changes is how you practise while the tissue heals — shorter sessions, more often, increasing to a plan.
The problem is often not pain
A musician can be in no pain at all and still be injured. Slower fingers, an unreliable vibrato, an embouchure that fails in the third hour, a tremor that appears only on stage — these are injuries too, and they need to be examined as injuries.
String players
Stiff or unresponsive vibrato, slower or weaker fingers, loss of bow control, fingers catching in double stops, tremor in either hand, and pain or numbness that arrives with playing.
Violin, viola, cello, bass 02Wind & brass players
Embouchure that will not hold its focus, air leakage, trembling or asymmetry around the mouth, difficulty in the extreme registers, and loss of endurance and tone control.
Including embouchure injury 03Pianists & percussionists
Reduced dynamic range, hands that will not balance against each other, uneven trills, collapsing or unstable fingers, poor independence, and upper-limb pain or fatigue.
Keyboard and percussionPrecision measured in millimetres
During long practice sessions, two players of the same instrument with the same posture complaint can injure entirely different structures. "Locations" here does not mean shoulder pain or tendinitis. It means the specific muscle, nerve, or fascial layer that is actually damaged — and finding it is the whole job.
When we can identify and target a structure to within one to five millimetres, that is the level of precision a musician's treatment requires. Precision matters here in exactly the way it matters in music.
What a first visit involves
- Diagnostic ultrasound of the structures your instrument actually loads
- Assessment of playing posture and body use, with your instrument in your hands
- Surface EMG where it clarifies which muscles are working and which are not
- A treatment plan built around your repertoire and your calendar
Three musicians who had been told to wait
Details anonymised. What these three had in common was not their injury — it was that rest and conventional treatment had already been tried, at length, without result.
A violinist, one week before an international competition
A chronic shoulder and neck injury deteriorated until the arm could no longer be raised. The competition went ahead, badly. A flight back to Taiwan was booked immediately afterwards.
A conservatory viola student, one year into a leave of absence
Severe shoulder pain had forced a year away from school. A full year of rest and treatment had not changed it.
A cello student after a serious traffic accident
Unable to play for more than ten minutes at a time despite numerous treatments, and told that returning to the instrument might never be possible.
Each was worked up with diagnostic ultrasound, postural and biomechanical correction, and regenerative treatment directed at the injured fascia, ligament, tendon, muscle and nerve, with surface EMG training where it was appropriate. Across one to three months, pain and physical limitation improved substantially in all three.
But reducing pain is only the beginning. The harder question — the one this clinic exists for — is how a musician returns to peak performance and keeps moving forward.
A physiatrist who is also a cellist
I am a Taiwanese physician specialising in physical medicine and rehabilitation and in pain medicine, and I play the cello. That second fact is not decoration. It is why I know what a musician means when they say the sound has gone hard, or that the hand no longer trusts itself — and why the examination looks for things a general musculoskeletal assessment would not think to look for.
My work on ultrasound examination of musicians has been published in international journals, presented at the Performing Arts Medicine Association conference in London, and taught to physicians in several countries.
Tell me what has changed in your playing.
Email your symptoms, how long you have had them, and a short video of you playing — under thirty seconds is enough. I reply personally, and I will tell you honestly whether I think I can help before you book anything.