Efficacy of Dance Movement Therapy on Level of Pain and Resilience among Patients of Rheumatoid Arthritis

Description

Page: 347-350

Twisha Oza¹ and Kamayani Mathur² (Department of Psychology, Gujarat University, Ahmedabad, Gujarat¹ and Department of Psychology, Director, School of Psychology, Philosophy and Education, Gujarat University, Ahmedabad, Gujarat²)

Dance Movement Therapy (DMT) is used therapeutically to strengthen the emotional, cognitive, physical and social integration of the individual. DMT is also used to reduce stress and different types of pain including joints and muscle tension. It is also called a pain management technique. Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA) is a long-term illness characterized by severe pain in joints and various parts of the body. Pain is a relatively very common characteristic of RA. It can also impair an individual’s daily routine activities. Resilience is the capacity to mobilise personal resources to tolerate and overcome adverse events without experiencing stress. The current study aimed at determining the difference between levels of pain and resilience after completing 4 months of DMT among the patients of RA. A purposive sampling technique was used to collect the data from 40 clinically diagnosed RA patients from the different hospitals of Ahmedabad city. Rheumatoid Arthritis Pain Scale (Anderson, 2001) and Resilience Assessment Questionnaire (Mowbray, 2018) were used as research tools to collect the data. The data was statistically analyzed using the paired t-test and correlation. The obtained findings indicated that patients’ levels of pain (t=8.885) and resilience (t=13.316) differed with respect to the application of DMT. Also there is a correlation between pain and resilience (r=0.086). Further, this research suggests the importance of DMT and how it affects both the physical and psychological components of chronic illness.