Regional
(2010-01-25)
Listen Now:
GREELEY, CO
(KUNC) -
From the tango to salsa dancing - KUNC commentator Dr. Marc Ringel is back this morning with more evidence that dancing has therapeutic effects for those afflicted by physical and mental conditions.
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You may recall that my last piece was about the salutary effects of tango dancing on patients with Parkinsonism. Another study, which was just published in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, shows that dancing is great for serious mental illness too. The brief report is titled "Social Partnered Dance for People With Serious and Persistent Mental Illness, A Pilot Study."
Once again, a pilot study is a smaller research project that is designed to turn up leads for larger, more conclusive investigation. Only twelve patients were enrolled in this project. Two subjects were hospitalized and one dropped out for unreported reasons, so just nine people saw it through to the end. Four had schizophrenia, two major depression, two bipolar disorder, and one suffered with generalized anxiety. All were residents of a semi-sheltered facility for the mentally ill, located in Saint Louis.
Prior to the intervention subjects were timed at standing up from a chair and at balancing on one leg. How far they could walk in six minutes and how fast was also measured. Each person answered the Beck Depression and Anxiety Inventories, as well as a standard questionnaire that assessed their confidence at performing various activities that require balance. All of these are well- validated tests for assessing how well an ill person functions.
Then the subjects participated in a one-hour weekly salsa dancing lesson for ten weeks in a row. Each of the pre-study tests was repeated after the intervention period. These severely disturbed people showed gains in every one of the seven measures. They also sang the praises of the program in exit interviews, saying things like they'd learned "[that] you can teach old dog's new tricks." One subject said, simply, "I really had a blast and want to learn more."
Both subjectively and objectively, the experiment was a huge success. Of course there was no control group who didn't get dance lessons to compare to, and thus, not much of an argument, based on rigorous statistics, in favor of salsa dancing for the mentally ill. But who cares? Everybody who got to salsa dance got better.
I am a terrible dancer myself. I once took an after-hours ballet class at my medical school where I regularly brought my teacher to tears of laughter with the clumsiness of my jet and pas du bour e. But I dug it. And once I got over enough of the adolescent angst tied to the dreadful dances I was subject to in junior high and high school, I even started enjoying social dancing. (Maturity, alcohol and a forgiving wife have helped a lot, of course.)
I plan to keep on dancing into old age. Now I have the medical literature to reinforce my intention. I suspect the authors of this paper will continue dancing too. They're the same ones who did the tango and Parkinson study. I wonder what's next on their agenda. Perhaps something on moshing to relieve social anxiety disorder or the hoochy-cooch for back pain.
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