FROM music to medicine is an unusual career path, but Victor Candia is an unusual man. In 1993, when he was preparing to graduate as a guitarist from the University of Music in Trossingen, Germany, he noticed that the fingers of his left hand were starting to curl up as he played. It felt to him as if a magnet in his palm were preventing him from opening them. A week later, he could not play at all. He had succumbed to what doctors call focal dystonia, golfers call the yips, and instrumentalists and scribblers, respectively, call musician’s cramp and writer’s cramp…

This article first appeared in the Economist on 27 March 2014. To continue reading, click here.