Dance like nobody’s watching – it could even relieve some fibromyalgia symptoms…

Dancing helps people with fibromyalgia, especially if it’s creative, says a review of the evidence in Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice. Exercise has been shown to be an effective way of reducing fibromyalgia symptoms. Some work also reports benefits of dance-based interventions. So a team set out to see if creative dance and repetitive dance have similar levels of success.

They trawled through the research and found 15 relevant studies. Dance-based interventions did indeed reduce impact of fibromyalgia, pain levels and increased quality of life. And its effectiveness increased even more when a creative component was added.

The team concludes that “creative dance-based interventions could be more effective than repetitive dance-based interventions to reduce pain and fibromyalgia impact.”

Whilst more studies are needed before definitive conclusions can be drawn, the research is a great excuse to get your dancing shoes on! C

lick here to read the original research.

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