Young dancers sprain ankles. Aging dancers face knee and hip replacements. And along with the wear and tear -- the fractures, ruptures, strains and bruises that can threaten a dancer's career and well-being -- comes an ever greater need for customized treatment.
Today, though, brings a new option for worn-down members of the local dance community: the opening at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center of a facility specializing in dance medicine.
For The Record
Los Angeles Times Wednesday March 21, 2007 Home Edition Main News Part A Page 2 National Desk 2 inches; 69 words Type of Material: Correction
Dance facility: An article in Monday's Calendar about the new Cedars-Sinai/USC Dance Medicine Center identified co-founder Margo Apostolos as director of USC's Dance and Movement Program. It is the School of Theatre Dance Program. Also, Apostolos was reported to have held sports-medicine posts at Stanford, NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. In fact, she taught at Stanford and worked in space telerobotics at JPL as a NASA/ASEE Faculty Fellow.
The first of its kind in Los Angeles, the Cedars-Sinai/USC Dance Medicine Center will offer comprehensive injury treatment, rehabilitation and preventive care tailored to professional and recreational dancers.
It joins the Harkness Center for Dance Injuries in New York and the recently announced Institute for Dance Medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle as one of only a handful of such facilities in the country.
The center, in Cedars-Sinai's Mark Goodson Building, came about through the collaborative efforts of Cedars-Sinai orthopedic surgeon Glenn Pfeffer and dancer Margo Apostolos, director of USC's Dance and Movement Program. Under their direction, the center will address a broad spectrum of dance- and movement-related injuries.
"We want to treat dancers of all areas and all ages," Apostolos said. Los Angeles represents a greater population of people who engage in one form of dance or another -- including salsa, folkloric and hip-hop -- than any other city in the world, said Pfeffer, a foot and ankle specialist. "We think in terms of all athletics that involve motion and jumping, from aerobics to ice skaters and cheerleaders," he said.
The new center's full-time medical team was recruited from Cedars-Sinai staff and chosen for expertise in sports medicine and related areas and for an expressed interest in dance, added Pfeffer, a onetime competitive ballroom dancer who was sidelined by a foot injury.
The team consists of three physical therapists trained in the treatment of dance conditions and five "dance doctors" -- orthopedists with foot and ankle, knee and shoulder, back and hip, and adolescent and adult sports-medicine specialties.
Beyond treating injuries, the goal of the center, which also features a Pilates gym and underwater treadmills, is to teach dancers to prevent injuries and to treat them with an emphasis on minimally invasive surgical techniques that result in the ability to bear weight on the injured limb sooner and in quicker recovery of range of motion, Pfeffer said.
