When Lew Schon '82 took a dance class during his sophomore year, he had no idea that he would use
semi-pliés and relevés in his livelihood fifteen years later.
Although Schon loved his dance class, he didn't think about dance again until he began considering orthopedics while finishing his six-year medical program at Albany Medical College.
Today, as an orthopedic surgeon specializing in the ankle and foot-specifically, the dancer's foot-he thinks
about dancing every day.
Schon says he came to his career after spending a day with an orthopedic surgeon. “I had the best time in my medical life,” he says. “It was so enjoyable to pop bones back into place and realign joints. It was so much more tangible than other fields of medicine. It was such a relief that you could find the problem and fix it.”
Browsing through an orthopedic textbook on the foot, he discovered a section on dance. “The foot has been viewed as an unglamorous and unloved body part,” he says. “I found it intriguing that someone would write a two-volume textbook on it.” He found the section on dance even more fascinating, and he was suddenly sure that he wanted to study orthopedic podiatry, specializing in treating dancers.
Schon went on to study with the people who had written the textbook that spurred his interest. Today, “the dance doctor,” as he is sometimes called, practices orthopedics at The Union Memorial Hospital in Baltimore, treating patients while training orthopedic surgeons to become foot and ankle specialists. He does research, has published more than forty articles in journals and textbooks, and twice has received the annual National Foot and Ankle Research Award.
He has served as a consultant to the Maryland Ballet, the Annapolis Ballet, the Alvin Ailey Troupe, and the Washington Ballet as well as to several college and high school groups. He evaluates dancers so that he can identify conditions that might lead to foot problems, relying on a screening program he has developed that uses plies,
relevés, and other dance movements to evaluate muscoskeletal imbalances and alignments.
“The idea behind the screening is not to weed out dancers but to identify problems that might predispose the dancer's injury,” he says. If he can identify those areas, he can work with physical therapists, instructors, and directors to find better ways to compensate for the problem. “The recognition is the first part of it, but the corrective intention is the greatest challenge,” he says.
Schon also is working to increase awareness about the many components of dance medicine. He arranges the annual Dance Medicine Symposium at Goucher College, gathering specialists in several areas to talk about dance, and welcomes a Goucher College premed/dance student into his office as an intern for a dance science concentration major.
Schon has treated more than 800 dancers, including profesional dancers, from ballet dancers to cloggers to belly dancers to ethnic dancers. He has seen about half of them perform but admits that he is almost always watching their lower extremities.
Schon and his wife, Erika, have five sons, ages nine, seven, five, and three-year-old twins.