For four years, a professional oboist had been squinting involuntarily through much of the day, her brow furrowing and her eyelids narrowing without her permission. Yet her symptoms, her doctors wrote, "reliably abated when she played the oboe or when she sang, only to return immediately after stopping."
Neurologists at Western University in London, Ontario, then set out to find what exactly was helping. Imitating the movements of playing with the reed in her mouth did nothing. Imitating playing while blowing through a drinking straw did nothing. Talking did nothing. Only making music, by playing or singing, brought relief. Ryan Weng Zhou, Cathy Meng Fei Li, and John Alexander Fraser described the case in JAMA Neurology, where it was published online May 18.
