Dance for Parkinson's Patients

Patients with Parkinson’s have always had tremors (shaking) at any time in almost all parts of the body making it difficult to perform hand movements or running. Researchers found the Parkinson's tremor may be reduced if the patient is practicing dancing.

Scientists found dancing can help solve the problem of Parkinson's disease and had a great effect on the sufferer. Dancing can help develop the mindset of someone in solving problems including Parkinson's sufferers are often difficult to articulate thoughts.

"We watched people dance in the laboratory and then perform troubleshooting. Various types of dance to help them with various kinds of problem solving," said Dr. Peter Lovatt, head of the Psychology Lab at the University of Hertfordshire Dance as reported by the Guardian. Dr. Lovatt has been practicing ballet, tap, jazz, and worked as a professional dancer.

According to him, kind of dance improvisation helps to divergent thinking (broadly) so people are able to solve some of the answers. Meanwhile, while engaged in a dance that is very structured, it helps to think convergent (focused) and trying to find a single answer to the problem.

"We know that Parkinson's disease can cause divergent thinking processes. So we thought, if using an improvised dance of people with Parkinson's group, we may see an increase in the skill of thinking is different to them. And that's exactly what we are witnessing," he explained.

Dr. Lovatt admitted later he wanted to study whether the dance has an impact on neural processing for patients with Parkinson's. One possibility is that when dancing, individuals develop new neural pathways to overcome the blockage of dopamine (the hormone that makes fun).

Researchers reviewed several cases of self-esteem look of a ballet dancer in training. What they found was that girls ballet dancer in her mid-teens have a lower self-esteem than non-dancing girls.

There are two explanations for this. First, the girls of low self-selecting classical ballet as it seek to reinforce their low self-image. Second, ballet training can be very humbling self-esteem of a girl because they are constantly told that they did not do it properly and the problem of body shape is very important in classical ballet.

"We tried to test two hypotheses in the laboratory by comparing the data of 600 dancers in a different dance groups. So we're comparing the classical ballet dancer with classical Indian dancer. We also compare them with Burlesque dancers are very pleased to show more body contains. If found the case of girls of low self-selecting ballet, it is not much we can do about it. But if the classical ballet cause eating disorders and self-harm, then it's something very important we must be cautious, "said Dr. Lovatt.