Keeping Dancers on Their Toes

Illustration by Chiara Ghigliazza

Darcy Lei, D.O., focuses on dance and performing arts health care in UC Health’s Department of Neurology & Rehabilitation Medicine. A former pre-professional ballerina, she knows the day-to-day injury and training challenges that performers and athletes face. This is what she has to say about her journey.

I was always a dancer at heart. Basically from around the time I could walk, my parents would find me dancing around the house. I often would twirl around with my ballerina Barbie to the New York City Ballet Nutcracker on VHS, and my parents eventually felt they had no choice but to put me in dance classes.

I probably spent as much of my childhood in a ballet studio as I did in school. But in early high school I started to have a lot of injuries that put me on the sidelines and forced me to sit out.

I went to doctors who were supposed to help, including sports medicine specialists, but so many times I would just be told, “Oh, well. If it’s hurting when you dance, you just shouldn’t dance.” And that obviously wasn’t something I was willing to accept as the only answer. I remember being 13 or 14 years old and bringing my dance shoes with me to an appointment to demonstrate the problem to the doctor. And I remember the doctor just looking at me and saying, “Wait a minute. Ballet dancers dance on their toes?”

We have such amazing sports medicine physicians who understand what a baseball practice looks like or what it means to be in a football game or what the body endures at a wrestling tournament. But there aren’t as many dancers-turned-physicians who know what a dance class means, what it looks like, what a season for a dancer is, and what times we need to prioritize. Eventually, the frustration kind of forced my hand. I thought, You know what? I bet that I could do this better for the dancers and for other performing artists.

So I changed gears and ended up at Johns Hopkins University, which I knew had a great medical program. My physical medicine and rehabilitation residency was at the University of Cincinnati, and I loved it here so much that my husband and I decided to stay.

There’s a lot of education that still needs to be done in terms of the science of dance medicine. Dancers are incredibly similar to athletes, but in some ways they’re different, so we should treat them a little bit differently. Right now, though, I feel that conversation isn’t happening among health care providers and therapists. It’s time we take that information to the dancers so they can start acting on it, too.

My hope for the dancers I treat is that we can trust each other. There’s always going to be pain in dance, right? But we need to differentiate between pain that’s just muscle soreness and pain that’s your body trying to tell you something. My goal is to be here as someone who understands.