Jennifer Marie J. Yang, MD

We’ll start off with what it is not: PAM is not: it is not the use of music/dance/art as a means of doing therapy. Music therapists have their own expertise, as do dance therapists, art therapists and therapeutic recreation (or recreational therapy) specialists.

Performing Arts Medicine (PAM) is the branch of medicine addressing the overall health, injury prevention and treatment for performing artists as they practice their craft. It is concerned with the special healthcare needs of dancers, musicians, actors, and other performing artists.

“Healthcare needs” of performing artists are quite broad – this is not limited to just physical health, but also mental and emotional health as well. For this reason, PAM is not limited to one medical specialty or healthcare field, but involves many diverse clinicians and their practices. Read more here.

Broadly, I think of PAM in categories: Dance Medicine, Musicians, Vocal Professionals (singers/actors/broadcasters) and Others.

• Dance medicine is probably the easiest to understand, because people know about sports medicine and by extension, dance can be thought of as a sport. The main difference is dancers have to look pretty while being athletic as they move their bodies through space.
• Musicians have been called “small muscle athletes”, because they use their hands and fingers a lot with much skill and endurance (i.e., they don’t get tired easily).
• Vocal Professionals express themselves with their voices for a living; singers are the first people who come to mind, but people who are TV or radio personalities, actors, journalists, Youtubers, are in this category as well. “Your body is your instrument” applies to singers (including yodelers) as musicians.
• Others: just because there aren’t too many of them, and because they don’t exactly fit into the other three categories. Circus folks like acrobats and aerialists, for example. Figure skaters could probably fall into this category as well, although I guess they could crossover to the sports medicine world (most physiatrists I know who practice PAM are also trained in sports medicine). Puppeteers, stuntmen, prop masters, Foley artists, stage managers… all those other people who are in the performing arts but not in the first three categories.

The nice thing about being practicing PAM as a Rehabilitation Medicine physician is that we are trained to look at the person as a whole, and not just at one body organ or system. We look at function: how people go about their day, interact with their environment and look for ways to help them do things more efficiently while reducing further injury risk. This training and focus on function helps me understand how to help performing artists: I don’t need to be a dancer or puppeteer, yet I understand what they do and how they do things.