Dance for Parkinson's genuinely helped my balance and I'm annoyed it took four years for anyone to mention it

#1two_left_feet_dave(Joined Apr 2026 · 4 posts)May 11, 2026, 3:33 pm

Diagnosed 2022. Four years of appointments, four years of medication reviews, four years of a physio I like very much, and not once did anybody in that building say the word dance to me.

I found the class because my neighbour's wife runs the tea urn at the venue. That is the entire referral pathway. A woman with an urn.

Fourteen weeks in. Thursday mornings, hour and a quarter, live pianist, about twenty of us and a lot of partners joining in rather than sitting round the edge. The thing I did not expect is how much of it is not what I would have called dancing. There is a long seated warm up, then work holding onto the back of a chair, then travelling across the floor, and the sequences build up over weeks so you are learning something rather than repeating something.

And my balance is better. I know how that sounds. I know I cannot prove it. But I turn round in the kitchen now without the little pause I had been doing for about two years, and my wife noticed before I said anything, which is the bit that makes me think it is not just me wanting it to be true.

So the annoyed part. Why did four years of clinicians not mention this. Is it because there is no evidence, or because nobody knows it exists?

#2Marion K.(Joined Jul 2024 · 38 posts)May 11, 2026, 7:02 pm

Your wife noticing before you said anything is worth more than most of what gets published, in my opinion. Which I accept is not how any of this works.

#3stillpainting62(Joined Nov 2024 · 26 posts)May 13, 2026, 8:41 am

Going to be the person who asks, because this is the section for it and I would want somebody to do it to me.

I have seen numbers attached to dance and Parkinson's. Percentages, an improvement in something called a mobility scale, a figure about falls. I went looking for where they come from, partly because of this thread, and I want to report what I found rather than what I hoped to find.

This site's own dance for Parkinson's page states outright that no dance effect size is locked in its source document, so none appears on the page. Not softened, not buried in a footnote. It says the same about falls on dance, balance and falls. So the honest answer to "what does the research say" is that this board cannot hand you a number, and the pages say why rather than importing one from a report that quotes a report.

The reasoning underneath it is the part I found useful. The dance trials that exist are small, blinding a dance class is close to impossible, and the comparison group is usually a waiting list. Which means you cannot separate the dancing from the company, the structure, the attention, the expectation and the simple business of leaving the house on a Thursday. All of which are real and none of which is dance.

And on falls specifically the claim that holds up is about exercise rather than about dance. Structured strength and balance work reduces falls, and a dance class can be a way of delivering it if it actually does progressive strength and balance under changing conditions, sustained over months. Proving that dance beats an equivalent exercise class would need the two put head to head, and that is not the comparison anybody has run.

Dave, none of which contradicts you. Nobody can honestly tell you a class will improve your balance, and nobody can honestly tell you it will not, and your kitchen is your kitchen. I am asking for the source because the alternative is a board where we talk each other into things, not because I think you imagined it.

#4mikeatthepiano(Joined Feb 2025 · 19 posts)May 15, 2026, 12:17 pm

The live pianist detail jumped out at me. Almost every one of these classes has one and it is not decoration, the whole class runs on somebody watching the room and moving the tempo.

#5two_left_feet_dave(Joined Apr 2026 · 4 posts)July 20, 2026, 4:58 pm

Update, two months on, and it has taken a turn I did not expect when I wrote the first post.

I took the thread to my physio appointment, mostly to be smug. She was not remotely defensive. What she said was that she had heard of the classes, that she would not have suggested one instead of anything she does, and that a dance class is not a substitute for physiotherapy however good it is, which I had half assumed it might eventually become.

Then she asked whether I had fallen in the last year. I said yes, twice, back in the winter, nothing serious, and I had not mentioned it to anybody because I got up both times. And that turned the appointment into a completely different appointment. Blood pressure sitting and standing, a look at my medicines, a conversation about my feet. Apparently the assessment is the thing with the best evidence behind it and I had been walking past it for four years while complaining that nobody had told me about the dancing.

So my annoyance has moved rather than gone. Still annoyed nobody mentioned the class. More annoyed that I sat on two falls because I could get up afterwards.

I am still going on Thursdays. My wife still says I turn round differently. I have stopped saying it is because of the dancing, and I have started saying I do not know why and I do not much care, which is a more honest sentence and a less satisfying one.