Do Medical Professionals take Dance Psychology seriously, especially in people with Parkinson’s?
When we started doing the research, we worked with a group of people with Parkinson’s. And there were some people who said,
“look, I went to see my consultant and told them I was part of this dancing project. And my consultant said to me,”
“well, that’s not going to do any good, is it? I mean, it’s not going to have any major impact”
And so there were some consultants who were very anti the prospects of that [dancing] being beneficial. And of course, because they’re science-based people, they want to see the evidence. And until we get clear, strong evidence, then we wouldn’t expect them to change policy [or treatment pathways] in any way at all.
We’re very lucky now with things like Parkinson’s UK, that there are medical consultants who are part of Parkinson’s UK, who are interested in looking at the evidence [around dance] and supporting people with Parkinson’s.
Now, of course, as a scientist, I’m not making any recommendations. I’m simply looking at the evidence. Nobody is saying that dancing is better or is a replacement for traditional medical therapies. We’re not saying that in the least.
And what we need to be careful of is sticking closely to the evidence base. So we say, okay, so for some people, there might be some positive impact on some of their symptoms by doing some of these types of activities [dancing]. And our job really is to work out what sort of dance, how much dance the people need, what kind of people with Parkinson’s does it help? Because of course, you’ve got different stages of Parkinson’s disease. You’ve got this Hoehn & Yahr staging where you have people with very severe Parkinson’s, down for people with very mild Parkinson’s, and there are over 40 symptoms. And so you could have 20 people, all at different stages of Parkinson’s in terms of severity and with an entirely different symptom profiles. And then of course, saying all of those people should dance to see an improvement is ridiculous because it’s not gonna help all of those people with all of those different symptoms.
But we need to understand how targeted the movement can be. And we’re also interested in trying to understand the brain. We know that Parkinson’s, well, we think it derives from the brain dopamine. There’s some indication about what things happening in the gut for people with Parkinson’s. But we need to understand what’s the relationship between movement, perhaps to music and changes that might happen in the brain. So that’s what we’re trying to do. And I think if we can generate good quality evidence or evaluate the evidence in a clear and consistent way so that we don’t make claims like all dancing is good for all people with Parkinson’s in all conditions because the medical community would get rid of that.
Now, one of the other questions you asked was, there are so many things to spend our money on, is that good value? Well, the cost of providing dance for people is tiny. It is tiny. It’s, yeah, it’s a, I mean. Yeah, even that, even if you had a dance teacher might have five or six people in a class with them. And then the, because some of the benefits, there are benefits associated with dancing. And some of those, so for instance, one of the benefits is that what we think, there might be an improvement in balance for people or there might be a reduction in people’s fear of falling.
So of course that then leads to a massive change. If you’ve got a fear of falling and you’re a bit unsteady on your feet or very unsteady on your feet, your quality of life can be quite reduced. And then if you’ll, let’s imagine you become homebound and then let’s imagine you’re living alone and you don’t have family around and you become socially isolated, then there’s a prospect then you might become depressed. We know that people with Parkinson’s have high levels of depression, maybe that increases. And then of course the cost on society of helping you is massive because you’re now socially isolated, you’re not getting out.
But if we can help people to be confident with their movement so that they can walk, they have less fear of falling, they can leave the house, they can go and visit neighbors, they can get to the shops, their mood lifts up, then it’s well worth spending a small amount of money to support somebody under those circumstances. Now I’m not suggesting it’s as easy as that, but it’s a complex situation. And I think having a range of therapeutic options in a complimentary way, but all of those things I think have to be driven entirely by the evidence. And that’s what’s really important for us.
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