Met a dozen new pwp yesterday at an event I attended, with plenty of chance to talk to them. Out of those FOUR asked whether there was a PD based dance class anywhere near me, and three of those had one they attended, and found great benefit. We laughed a lot about how strange it was that moving easily came from turning on the right music and letting go....

Both singing and dancing came up for a lot of discussion as viable alternative routes to better living, with both being cited as not just good for movement, but being very helpful for mood, depression, and apathy.

Sadly very little money goes into providing classes like these for pwp, mostly they are the result of random acts of helpfulness or good thinking from people connected to or part of the PD community. Interesting too how they are a part of the self-help that pwp have discovered within the community and that science follows life, and not the other way round. Many of the paths that science and medicine go down the road that peoples needs describe. In PD one of these is has to be drugs like stalevo and extended release medications. We WANT treatments that we don't have to take every two hours, so science goes out and studies how to give them to us.

In the case of dance they cannot give us a treatment that comes out of the study. Ergo, studying it is wasteful, and it would be more economic to put money into services instead! Exercise too, there are so many studies to 'prove' minute details of things that are self-evident, like moving more will help people who have a condition that limits movement. No sports physio now would hesitate to recommend massage, it is wholly accepted as a viable treatment for athletes........ studies are not needed, the proof is in the people.

The need to measure everything into minutely detailed causes and effects is sometimes a strength of science, but is also one of it's great weaknesses; everything has a flip side.......

If there were more classes available that incorporated perhaps those three things, exercise, dance and singing, and a route to more information on PD it would help so many, especially in rural areas. It would also help combat the tendency of some pwp to disappear into their homes as PD bites harder......

Lindy