Injury Prevention Presentation

Last Tuesday the school of music brought in a speaker to give an introductory session on preventing and managing musicians’ injuries over the lunch hour.  About thirty people came to listen, and almost all of them were injured or in pain in some way.  In a faculty the size of music, that’s a lot of people, and I know for a fact that there are others with injuries that didn’t come.  With so many people with injuries hampering their schooling and career, it’s great that the school brought someone in,  but it’s also not nearly enough.

It would have been more useful to have this sort of thing at the beginning of the year rather than at the end, because the beginning of the year is when people start practicing extremely heavily again, and new students (such as myself) would benefit greatly from injury prevention workshops before they get them, rather than at the end of the year when they’re already injured.

In addition, one hour is not enough to say everything you need to about every kind of injury and all the different things you need to do to prevent them and manage them in detail.  We barely even talked about management in the session on Tuesday.  There’s enough material to make a course out of it – and I really think that there should be one.  The school should offer a course on prevention and management of musician’s injuries; even if it isn’t mandatory, it should be available, because this is vital information, and it can be extremely hard to get ahold of.  When I got injured, I had no idea what to do or where to turn, and a course like this would give musicians a place to start and some knowledge to work with.

Honestly, if I had my way, the school would have its own physio/occupational therapist that students could visit free of charge.  Because like I said, when I got injured, I didn’t know what to do or who to ask about it.  This would be a specialized resource immediately available to students that would help them get on the road to recovering almost immediately.

Whether they get their own therapist, I think physiotherapy for music students’ injuries should be covered by the university – to the best of my knowledge they cover athletes’ physio – and those bills can really add up.  For a student already struggling with paying for tuition and living expenses, it can be stressful to have to pay all those physio bills, on top of the stress of not being able to do the one thing you love the most: make music.