These trends shift our starting-point assumptions about health, shaping and limiting the ways in which we conceptualise and talk about health and ability in education. What do we even consider normal in regard to students’ wellbeing? Why do we talk about problems as a deviation from the norm when problems are the norm? Are students merely unlucky during college, or do they need to be lucky to get through it? Instead of raising these difficult questions, the trend amongst institutions has been to take a corporate approach to health management by sprinkling health awareness and coping strategies into the curriculum rather than changing the systemic issues that cause the serious health problems said to be addressed. Health awareness and other crucial frontline initiatives, such as therapy and physiotherapy, are, of course, incredibly important, which cannot be stressed enough. Therapy literally saves lives, and physiotherapy can rehabilitate and keep people from breaking apart. Although these crucial first-aid measures are rightfully receiving some recognition, they are often seen as the cure rather than as a bandage, doubling down on seeing the solution as individual coping skills rather than fixing the systemic causal problems.

Despite musicians’ health issues being primarily caused by problems in pedagogical, cultural, and institutional traditions and structures, it is notable how many of these institutional challenges are seen as unrelated to health. Medical issues are somehow placed in a separate realm. This problem can be likened to, for example, a government not linking car accidents to driving cultures and road safety, assuming instead that this is purely a medical driver issue to be solved by physiotherapist, mental coaches, and awareness talks about the importance of drivers’ self-care and access to help (for their individual problems). Importantly, regardless of how crucial and beneficial the medical frontline measures are in music education, no college will be able to fund enough mental and physical first-aid kits to successfully compensate for the bleeding that structural issues are causing in the first place. Instead, to realistically and sustainably improve the wellbeing of students, we need to better understand the discourse on health that we have inherited.