It’s a tropical rainy season in Southeast Asia and the recent health phenomena like novel coronavirus epidemic has caught the eye of Asians and the ear of the world. This rises concerns on global economy and pushes the urgency to change the habit on the lifestyle hygiene.
Hygiene, is the least activity we can make changes from the smallest effort. With the right hygiene habit, we can build a foundation to have a healthy lifestyle. This makes me begin to ponder on how this hygiene would relate with dancing, particularly how dancing can play part as hygiene habit to eventually help curing the medical diseases?
Dance and Parkinson Disease (PD)
One common disease that is regarded as a global belief that dance can play part is Parkinson Disease — a neurological disease typically happens in the elderly that impairs motor ability. A literature review suggests that dance could effectively improve balance, motor impairment, and endurance in Parkinson patients through regular dancing program in 2–3 months. Another research from Washington University at St. Louis compares the effect in patient’s motor sign and functional mobility through Tango dance intervention and a mixed style of dance intervention. Turns out Tango dance could help to improve both aspects better than the mixed style.
I’m personally interested with how Tango can provide more effect compared with other defined dance style. When I dig deeper into why this happens, it is written that movements in Tango dance specifically address the source of impairment of PD patients better than the mixed style (for example: stepping, turning, rhythmic movements, standing). Those basic movements in Tango is the targeted hygiene of dancing in improving patients with PD.
Not only improving the source of impairment, PD patients could also benefit in being happier and socially connected like we do!
Dance and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD)
The effect of dancing activities for PTSD patients is positive, a literature review shows by Birmingham Young University. This type of dancing is emphasizing more on therapeutic approach (we call it Dance Movement Therapy or DMT), where it addresses kinesthetic empathy and non-goal oriented treatment as one of main goals.
Empathy for treating PTSD is essential to understand the traumatic experience that patients have. With kinesthetic empathy in dancing, we’re able to embrace and understand the patients’ journey through the kinesthetic way, hence we’ll be able to understand the connection between their emotional, social, and cognitive impairments due to the those experiences.
“Dance movement therapy gives multiple applicable tools to patients looking for long-term recovery and renewed quality of life after trauma. Just a few of these tools include interpersonal skills, self-awareness, emotion regulation efficiency, and self-compassion (Dosamantes- Beaudry, 1997). Barlow (2017) demonstrates that a lack of these skills plays a vital role in the development and continuance of PTSD symptoms.” — Parker (2018)
Non-goal oriented treatment in DMT is aimed to crack Patient’s subconscious emotions which he/she is not aware o fthat could trigger the PTSD symptoms. It was revealed that non-goal oriented treatment could lead to decreasing stress and improving body’s self efficacy compared with goal oriented treatment.
In treating patients with PTSD, I would say both kinesthetic empathy and the aim of non-goal treatment would be the hygiene of doing DMT. Note that this is only discussing about PTSD among other things that could be cured by DMT. I believe the hygiene factor for DMT is wide depending on the type of disease we’re about to cure.
Dance and Schizophrenia
For Schizophrenia patients who are diagnosed with relapsed episodes of hallucinations and delusions, the role of DMT is significantly positive as well, particularly contributing in anger control and negative psychotic symptoms, said a group of researchers from Korea.
Researchers from Taiwan also address specifically on the positive influence of aerobic dance in intervening patient’s cognitive impairment. In this study, they assess patients in the experimental group before the intervention and after 3 months of aerobic intervention with 4 types of tests, assessing psychomotor speed, memory, visual-spatial ability, and verbal fluency. The result would be compared with patients in the control group where they got no dance intervention. The result shows that aerobic dance positively plays role for improvements in 4 test results in the experimental group compared with the test results from the control group.
What would be the hygiene for this research is the way aerobic dance intervention is designed for the patients. The typical conventional aerobic movements are considered repetitive, but in this research, they add dynamic movements that can trigger patient’s muscle groups as well as providing stimuli to their cognitive ability to remember each of the movements — hence, proved in the test results that they show improvements in the memory, speed, visual-spatial, and verbal.
From above and other research I’ve been stumbled upon, I may conclude that dance is an emerging solution in supporting people with chronic diseases. There are papers that discuss about the contribution of dance therapies or dance interventions to cancer and dementia, but little evidence is proven by far and thus, further research is suggested to test out whether this unrevealing science is consistent until we can prove it wrong.
