Dancing through the pain: physician executive launches new business to treat patients with chronic pain - Profile

Physician Executive, Jan-Feb, 2004 by Will Bunch

Wilhelmina Korevaar, MD, MMM glides across the hardwood floor in her elegant floral print dress as dramatic Latin-flavored music blares from a small stereo system, filling the narrow room and spilling out open doorways to the cobblestone streets of Philadelphia's historic district.

Brona Vrtalova, an award-winning dancer and instructor from the Czech Republic, wiry and energetic, leads Korevaar in her graceful moves, as each keep one eye on the dance studio's mirrored walls. Vrtalova is gentle but firm, pushing up Korevaar's shoulder muscle in an effort to keep her posture straight as she moves.

The dance teacher is constantly gesturing, showing Korevaar how to keep her head upright. "If my back is just a little bit back," he says in his thick European accent, "then all my energy is separated."

Korevaar isn't just taking a routine dance lesson on this late summer evening. This is how the physician--with a specialty in pain management--was getting ready for the opening of her new clinic last fall, located right next door to the Society Hill Dance Academy.

Her facility is called MDance, and Korevaar believes that it's the very first of its kind--using dance therapy as a technique to reduce chronic pain and restore patients to a more active lifestyle.

"Sometimes, working out in the water or on a bike is not adequate" for patients with overwhelming chronic pain, Korevaar says. "And sometimes it's hard to get women out walking. But this is something that people would do in the course of their day-to-day life--hearing music and dancing."

As she works out with Vrtalova, she's not only learning salsa and tango steps but what moves might alleviate back pain, for example, or which ones help a patient with sore arms.

In one way, Korevaar's clinic and her bold approach to pain management is the culmination of a calculated career move some five years ago, when she went back to school and earned her master's degree in medical management at Carnegie Mellon University through the American College of Physician Executives.

Accidents happen

But Korevaar's career has also been driven by accidents--and not just the kind that cause patients to seek out this pioneer in the treatment of pain. Only a twist of fate caused her to switch career paths from art to medical school. Then, she started out on a program to become a surgeon--and shifted gears once again.

No accident had a greater impact on Korevaar's current career than a huge misunderstanding she had several years ago with her future husband.

"I actually started doing this because I had tremendous anxiety about social dance--and when I met my current husband, he made a small comment to me that I misunderstood," Korevaar recalls, laughing. "He said that being able to dance together was really important to him. Well. I panicked." Korevaar was a child of Southern California in the 1960s and 1970s, "so all I really know how to do is jump around."

But nothing spurs Korevaar on more than a challenge, and she never does anything halfway. After the remark, she signed up for what she jokingly calls "hundreds of dance lessons," covering everything from the tango to salsa. It was only after she'd paid up for the instruction that she found out she'd totally misconstrued what her future groom had said.

"It turned out my husband didn't know how to dance either. All he knew was how to jump around." The couple did learn enough to do a tango at their wedding, but in the meantime Korevaar realized that dancing was also making her feel better physically and mentally as she reached middle age.

"I was starting to get 60-year-old aches and pains," says Korevaar, who is now just 51. "I would wake up in the morning and my fingers were numb. I was starting to feel old." But those things changed dramatically with her dance lessons.

Korevaar lost 40 pounds and she never felt better. The improvement was dramatic when she moved to the Society Hill Dance Academy and started working with two Czech-born and trained dancers, Rene Ostarek and Vrtalova. "In just one or two months of working with them, my entire posture changed," she says.

"It was then," Korevaar adds, "that the light bulb clicked." Korevaar says that bad posture, often compounded by poor eating habits, placed pressure on the spinal chord that in turn leads to problems with the way that nerves fire.

Over the last couple of years, Korevaar worked closely with Ostarek and Vrtalova to learn how specific dance movements and posture improvements can help different types of medical problems. She says that shoulder pain, for example, "is probably a neck problem, and you need to support your torso and your neck more from below."

Korevaar's ideas eventually led to the creation of MDance. She now spends afternoons working with patients and the two instructors in the studio, after evaluating their pain problems inside her medical office.

Not the first time

This is far from the first time that Korevaar struck out in a bold new direction. The habit may come from her father, who moved her family from the Netherlands to America shortly after Korevaar was born because he saw a lot more opportunities to teach in his field of mathematics in U.S. universities.