http://www.news-medical.net/news/201...arkinsons.aspx

Another study to tell us what we already know. Wouldn't the money be better spent opening dance clinics with transportation.? I'm almost positive dance is like exercise and the rhythm and music have everything to do with helping movement.

in the article it says, the 'challenge' is to find out what type of dancing helps pwp.

and then they are going to.............?????????????

I can hardly believe I am reading this sentence:
"The challenge now is to find out what kind of dance may help people with Parkinson's."
Well, doc, maybe you like Sinatra and I don't.
The music you should dance to is WHATEVER TURNS YOU ON BABY.
I mean, are PWP really that different from everybody else that we can't rely on them to choose music that makes them want to tap their feet, move their bodies, forget the Off times for awhile and feel really On; emotionally and physical turned on.
At the beginning, choose music that speaks to you and for you and of you, and GET IT ON BABY. Later you can try other music.
Me, I started with the Blues, on the advice of John Lee Hooker (The Blues is a healer, it healed me, it can heal you if you let it.)
Now I am listening to Mongolian throat music. Dancing and singing it.
I wore earphones and listened to music all day everyday for four years, trying to use the part of the brain that handles dance and music. It does not make me live longer but it helps me to live at a higher level of spirit - dance and music help raise me up from a situation that is not liveable unless I can rise above it.
There are thousands of PWP dancing, and they would be the ones who should be tracked.
I know one nursing home for PWP where they stopped the music and the dancing, because when they put on a romantic song from the war years, men who had been in the war broke down and cried.
And that was disruptive behaviour. Swallow your pill, sit in the chair and stare at the wall. Easier to manage.
That will come to all of us soon enough. ln the meantime, let's get it on. PD wants to disconnect your body from your brain; dancing says STFU and dance.

This is impolite and self-aggrandizing of me, but for years and years there has been plenty of talk and observation about what kind of dancing works : it is what works for you. So, for example, one study simply used the Tango, because it is the most difficult for anyone with a movement disorder.

Do not attempt to read all of these, as it is just too much to read, but look at the beginning of each one and read a little of the beginning of each one and its seems that the dancers have not been listened to enough by the neurologists; and everyone’s reaction to dancing as therapy is very individual, making it hard for science to quantify.

Dancers talk about neurology more than neurologists talk about dancing. The neurologists are imbalanced :
http://parkinsonsdance.blogspot.com/...chapter-9.html

Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis
Dancers and Neurologists get together
http://parkinsonsdance.blogspot.com/...hapter-11.html

A major evolutionary benefit : THREE SECONDS WATCHING THE DANCE, AND YOUR BRAIN LIGHTS UP
http://parkinsonsdance.blogspot.com/...hapter-12.html

It takes two to Tango
From Argentina, with love
http://parkinsonsdance.blogspot.com/...hapter-13.html

ALEX KERTEN TAKES A HARD LINE
AGAINST PARKINSON'S DISEASE
http://parkinsonsdance.blogspot.com/...hapter-15.html

Paula - I agree with you. I think some foundation / organization money would be much better spent if it was diverted to direct services.

And Paula asked, "Do we really need to spend money on this?"

A big chunk of the failure of the industry that grew around our illness is right in that sentence from Paula.
I am not at all sure of this statistic, but someone told me there are 8,000 scientific studies of Parkinson's every year - about 5,000 in the USA and 3000 in the rest of the world.
So we know about PWP and chocolate. And the facial expressions of PWP. And the tinest variations of taking the same old pills.
There is nobody to say "Well, how about we try to cure the disease" or "Maybe scientists should work together rather than hiding their medical research from each other" or "how about we locate these suffering people and make sure that they are not sitting alone trembling with pain."
Or, "In addition to a doctor's requirement that they take these pills, there should be an equal requirement that they take some sort of physical - mental - spiritual - emotional - life embracing stuff to do, so we fade away with dignity and human kindness and thereby set an example to all others who will also have to die.
I had a friend who died alone in the forest, with late stage PD and I was the one who found him. He lived alone at the end of a dirt road. He saw a doctor about 15 minutes twice a year. Other than that, he was on his own. Two or 3 of us local PWP used to go visit him, but other than that he had no family, no friends; the neighbours viewed him with suspicion. We struggled with guilt about how we did not do enough for him. But we, suffering from the same disease, seemed to be the only ones who even knew he existed.
My nasty attitude toward the whole Parkinson's Industry dates from that day.

what a sad day that must have been but of course you can't blame yourself. It's going to get tough all around we know that but people who waste money instead of figuring this out are despicable.

Yes, but it would really be spent wisely if they spent it for, i don't know........ finding a cure instead of band-aids????!!!!

GregD - the orgs spend a lot of their budget on programs designed to help us "live better" with PD - I think it could be more targeted and better spent without as much duplication as it is now. The research is chugging along just fine - but it will be years before we see any disease changing results from it. The research has told us NOW that music and dance are good for PD -I think some money should be spent on getting that word out to more doctors and patients and making these programs more widely available. It's not enough to simply broadcast the information in a newsletter - more should be done to actually bring services to patients.

Bob, almost forgot to mention how notable your interest
is in this category:"Mongolian throat music. Dancing and singing it."

I suspect it would be different than anything I've ever seen.......I'll have to check it out.

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