Dance Movement Therapy (DMT) for chronic pain
Photo credit: American Dance Therapy Association
Among many other disturbances and disruptions, sufferers of chronic pain develop fear of movement and avoid engaging in physical activity or exercise due to this fear. Individuals with chronic pain also tend to dissociate or disintegrate from their own body. Body dissociation might be a survival or protection strategy from overwhelming physical pain (Deal, 2011). Dissociating from oneself might also lead to low body awareness and issues with mind-body communication and mind-body synchrony.
The job of the therapist is to develop a holistic movement program that reduces patient’s movement anxiety and reshapes the interpretation - from movement being an agent of fear to movement as an agent of pleasure, relaxation, tension-reducing, and movement as an agent of enhanced self control. This all can be achieved through an intentional form of dance therapy.
Dance therapy involves the integration of many systems that tend to not work well when a person has chronic pain. Dance therapy involves the coordination of motor systems (moving with the rhythm), sensory systems (listening to the music and many other cues from the body and from the environment), and involves the cognitive, affective, social, and emotional coordination. All of these should be physio-and-psycho-therapeutic for the chronic pain sufferer. Essentially, the symbolic movement patterns (via dance therapy), can help a person be more present in their own body, and this could contribute to positive self-perception, body image, self-esteem, and self-confidence (Blazquez et al, 2010).
Evidence for dance therapy is limited and mixed (due to heterogeneity, low number of studies, and non-standardized control groups). See below for brief papers and the associated findings:
Decrease in subjective ratings of movement pain (Deal, 2011)
Increase body-awareness and perception in fibromyalgia ( (n-36 ,RCT, Horwitz et al, 2003)
Pre-post design: 10 female patients with CFS (chronic fatigue syndrome), attending one hour weekly DMT session for 4 months. Results: participants reported improvements in body image, reduction of discomfort, and increase in social support (Blazquez et al, 2010)
22 participants with chronic pain, 10 weeks of Dance Movement Therapy (DMT): Statistically significant improvements in resilience, kinesophobia, body awareness and pain intensity over time. 68% reported moderately feeling better after the intervention (Shim et al, 2017).
References
Anand, K. J., & Craig, K. D. (1996). New perspectives on the definition of pain. Pain-Journal of the International Association for the Study of Pain, 67(1), 3-6.
Blazquez, A., Guillamó, E., & Javierre, C. (2010). Preliminary experience with dance movement therapy in patients with chronic fatigue syndrome. The Arts in Psychotherapy, 37(4), 285-292.
Bullington, J., Nordemar, R., Nordemar, K., & Sjöström‐Flanagan, C. (2003). Meaning out of chaos: a way to understand chronic pain. Scandinavian journal of caring sciences, 17(4), 325-331.
Deal, B. (2011). Finding meaning in suffering. Holistic Nursing Practice, 25(4), 205-210.
Gatchel, R. J., McGeary, D. D., McGeary, C. A., & Lippe, B. (2014). Interdisciplinary chronic pain management: past, present, and future. American Psychologist, 69(2), 119)
Hanna, J. L. (1995). The power of dance: Health and healing. The Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine, 1(4), 323-331.
Horwitz, E. B., Theorell, T., & Anderberg, U. M. (2003). Fibromyalgia patients’ own experiences of video self‐interpretation: A phenomenological‐hermeneutic study. Scandinavian Journal of Caring Sciences, 17(3), 257-264.
.Osborn, M., & Smith, J. A. (2006). Living with a body separate from the self. The experience of the body in chronic benign low back pain: an interpretative phenomenological analysis. Scandinavian journal of caring sciences, 20(2), 216-222.
Shim, M., Johnson, R. B., Gasson, S., Goodill, S., Jermyn, R., & Bradt, J. (2017). A model of dance/movement therapy for resilience-building in people living with chronic pain. European journal of integrative medicine, 9, 27-40.
Wand, B. M., Parkitny, L., O’Connell, N. E., Luomajoki, H., McAuley, J. H., Thacker, M., & Moseley, G. L. (2011). Cortical changes in chronic low back pain: current state of the art and implications for clinical practice. Manual therapy, 16(1), 15-20.
