CLEVELAND, Ohio — It wasn’t the ambiance to which Dr. Michael De Georgia was accustomed. The elegance of Cleveland’s Severance Hall was a world away from the gritty Hard Rock Cafe in New Orleans.
De Georgia took to Severance Hall this weekend as part of the World Doctors Orchestra’s U.S. debut in Cleveland. He was among physicians from Australia, the United Kingdom, Germany and the United States who share a similar background: They are physicians, long-time musicians and now, part-time performers.
The emergence of the global ensemble endorses the idea that physicians, more than other professionals, are intrinsically linked to music.
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“There’s both right-hemisphere and left-hemisphere qualities in what we do,” said De Georgia, director of the neuroscience intensive care unit at University Hospitals Case Medical Center in Cleveland, who played xylophone for the World Doctors Orchestra.
De Georgia usually plays drums for The Codes, a self-proclaimed high-energy, straight-up rock ‘n’ roll band. “To be a physician, you have to draw on both all the time,” he said.
The theory — at least among the physicians who subscribe to it — goes something like this: Physicians rely on their logical left brains for medical studies, but they need empathetic and creative right brains to work with patients, and often, to find outlets for the heart-rending work they do on a daily basis.
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“I don’t think there are any studies” of this doctor-music theory, said Dr. Richard Lederman, a neurologist at the Cleveland Clinic who studies music’s impact on the brain and played the viola in the World Doctors Orchestra. “It’s, as we call it, a clinical impression.”
The World Doctors Orchestra is a philanthropic effort to raise awareness about the importance of affordable health care, said Dr. Anne Berghoefer, a Berlin psychiatrist who co-founded the orchestra in in 2007. The orchestra has no trouble finding volunteers, Berghoefer said. It now has a database of more than 320 physicians who rotate, depending on where the orchestra plays.
Physicians in the orchestra pay their own expenses. About 60 percent of regular orchestra members travel when it leaves Berlin. The rest of the musicians are recruited from the region that hosts the performance.
London Dr. Eugene Lewis, who plays bassoon in the European Doctors Orchestra, said he was rejected the first time he tried to play for the World Doctors Orchestra. He made the trip to the United States playing the contrabassoon “probably because they didn’t have anyone,” he joked.
“Medicine is mostly science, but it’s art as well,” Lewis said.
Other professions have musical ensembles, like the Atlanta Lawyers Orchestra. But no other profession has more orchestras than doctors do. There’s the Doctors Orchestra of Houston, Los Angeles Doctors Syphony Orchestra, the Australian Doctors Orchestra and the European Doctors Orchestra, among at least a half-dozen others.
This association with music starts early. Many prospective students for Case Western Reserve University’s School of Medicine include links to online music performances in their applications, said Dr. Lina Mehta, the associate dean of admissions. A few of the performances come from traditional musical powerhouses like Julliard. Case annually has a Doc Opera in which students write medically based parody.
But physician involvement, at least in classical music, is waning, said Dr. Ivan Shulman, longtime conductor of the Los Angeles Doctors Orchestra. Two decades ago, the orchestra accepted only physicians. Now, the orchestra is expanding its ranks by allowing non-physicians into the mix, Shulman said.
“I am afraid there’s a generational issue that comes into this,” he said. “Fifty years ago, you had many people with an Eastern European background. They all wanted to play the violin as well as Heifetz. You don’t see that anymore.”
Dr. Richard Gosnay seems to be proof of the physician-as-musician theory — except that he doesn’t buy it. Gosnay, a podiatrist from Danbury, Conn., played the trombone this weekend with the World Doctors Orchestra. He played in bands for a decade before going to medical school and still plays in ensembles around Danbury.
“I’ve heard other people say [doctors play more than others], but I haven’t seen that,” Gosnay said. “I bet I could find 85 lawyers to play together.”