Oct. 2, 2024 – In 2012, Tara Rynders’ sister was diagnosed with acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, a rare condition that affects the spinal cord and brain. For Rynders, a registered nurse in Denver, the news was devastating.
“She was this beautiful 26-year-old woman, strong and healthy, and within 12 hours, she went into a coma and couldn’t move or speak,” Rynders said. She flew to her sister in Reno, Nevada, and moved into her intensive care unit room. The helplessness she felt wasn’t just as a sister, but as a healthcare provider.
“As a nurse, we love to fix things,” Rynders said. “But when my sister was sick, I couldn’t do anything to fix her. The doctors didn’t even know what was going on.”
When Rynders’ sister woke from the coma, she couldn’t speak. The only comfort Rynders could provide was her presence and the ability to put a smile on her sister’s face. So, Rynders did what came naturally. …
She danced.
In that tiny hospital room, she blasted her sister’s favorite song – “Party in the U.S.A.” by Miley Cyrus – and danced around the room, doing anything she could to make her sister laugh.
And this patient who could not form words found her voice. “She’d holler so deeply, it almost sounded like she was crying,” Rynders remembered. “The depths of her grief and the depths of her joy coming out simultaneously. It was really amazing and so healing for both of us.”
Do You Know How Powerful Dancing Really Is?
Rynders is far from the only person who’s discovered the healing power of dance. Tellingly, the trend seems to be spreading among health care professionals. In recent years, doctors and nurses across the country – from Los Angeles, California, to Atlanta, Georgia; from TikTok’s “Dancing Nurse,” Cindy Jones, to Max Chiu, Nebraska’s breakdancing oncologist – have demonstrated that finding new ways to move your body may be just what the doctor ordered for mental and physical health.
It comes at a time when many Americans are struggling with mental health. According to the CDC, more than 1 in 5 U.S. adults live with a mental illness. A 2022 survey found that 90% of the public think there is a mental health crisis in the United States.
There’s ample evidence. A 2024 study from the University of Sydney in Australia found that dancing offers more psychological and cognitive benefits – helping with everything from depression to motivation to emotional well-being – than any other type of exercise.
Another study, published in February by The BMJ medical journal, compared the mental health benefits of everything from aerobic exercise to cognitive behavioral therapy with antidepressants and found that dance consistently offered the largest reductions in depression.
Structured dance, where you learn specific movements, can offer a huge boost to mental health, according to the 2024 University of Sydney study. But so does unchoreographed dancing, where you’re basically just letting your limbs do their own thing. A 2021 study, published in Complementary Therapies in Clinical Practice, found that 95% of dancers who just moved their bodies, regardless of how it looked to the outside world, still had huge benefits for people with depression, anxiety, and trauma.
How to Turn a Mastectomy Into a Dance Party
Deborah Cohan, 55, an obstetrician at Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital and Trauma Center, discovered firsthand the power of dance back in 2013. After finding a lump in her breast during a self-exam, she feared the worst. Days later, her radiologist confirmed she had invasive ductal carcinoma.
“It was a complete shock,” Cohan remembered. “I took care of myself. I ate right. I had no obvious risk factors. I did work the night shift, and there’s actually an increased risk for breast cancer among OB/GYN workers who do night shift work. But still, it took me completely by surprise. My kids were 5 and 8 at the time, and I was terrified that they’d grow up without a mom.”
So, Cohan turned to the only thing that gave her comfort – dance class. Dancing had been an escape for Cohan since she took her first ballet class at 3 years old. So, when her supervisor offered her the day off, she went to her weekly Soul Motion dance class, where she found herself doing the exact opposite of escaping. She embraced her fears.
“I visualized death as a dance partner,” Cohan said. “I felt a freedom come over my body. It didn’t make sense to me at the time, but it was almost joyful. Not that I was accepting death or anticipating death, but just that I acknowledged its presence. There’s so much pressure among people with cancer to be positive. [But] that’s something that needs to come from within a person, not from outside. Nobody can dictate how someone should be feeling. And as I danced, I was genuinely feeling joy even as I recognized my own fears and didn’t turn away from them. I was experiencing all the emotions at once. It was such a relief to realize this wasn’t all going to be about sadness.”
The experience was so healing for Cohan that she decided to see if she could bring those same feelings into her bilateral mastectomy. When meeting with her surgical team, Cohan made an unorthodox request: Could her pre-op include a dance party?
“I asked the anesthesiologist in the pre-op appointment if I could dance, and he said yes,” she recalled, laughing. “And then I checked with the surgeon, and he said yes. And then I asked the perioperative nurse, and he said yes, ‘but only if you don’t make me dance, too.’ So somehow it all came together.”
Cohan decided on the Beyoncé song “Get Me Bodied,” which she says resonated with her because “it’s all about being in your body and being your full self. I was like, that is exactly how I want to show up in the operating room.” The moment the music kicked in and Cohan broke into dance, all of her stress melted away.
“Even though I’d been given permission to dance, I never expected anybody else to join in,” Cohan said. But that’s exactly what they did. A friend took a video, which shows Cohan in a hospital gown and bouffant cap, dancing alongside her surgical and anesthesia teams, all of whom are dressed in scrubs, at Mount Zion Hospital in San Francisco.
“It’s weird to say, especially about a mastectomy,” Cohan said, “but it was one of the most joyful moments of my life.”
The video’s been viewed 8.4 million times and is so inspirational – we dare you to watch it and not want to jump out of your chair to dance – that soon others were following Cohan’s lead.
- Sixteen-year-old Amari Hall danced to celebrate his successful heart transplant.
- Ana-Alecia Ayala, a 32-year-old uterine cancer survivor, danced along to “Juju on That Beat” to make chemotherapy more tolerable.
- Doreta Norris, a patient with breast cancer, chose “Gangnam Style” to serenade her into surgery.
Good Medicine
Rynders realized the true power of dance years before her sister’s illness, when her mother passed away from cancer. “I’ve always considered myself to be very resilient as a human, but I couldn’t bounce back after my mom died,” she said. “I was sad all the time. And then one day I realized, you know what brings me joy? It’s always been dance.”
She went back to school to get her Master of Fine Arts in Dance from the University of Colorado at Boulder and founded The Clinic in 2017, a company that provides dance workshops for health care professionals struggling with burnout and secondary traumatic stress.
Cohan, who today is cancer-free, says her experience made her completely rethink her relationship with patients. She has danced with more than a few of them, though she’s careful never to force it on them. “I never want to project my idea of joy onto others,” she said. “But more than anything, it’s changed my thinking on what it means to take ownership as a patient.”
The one thing Cohan never wanted as a patient, and the thing she never wants for her own patients, is the loss of agency. “When I danced, I didn’t feel like I was just handing over my body and begrudgingly accepting what was about to happen to me,” she said. “I was taking ownership around my decision, and I felt connected, really connected, to my surgical team.”
As a patient, she experienced what she calls the “regimented” atmosphere of medicine. “You’re told where to go, what to do, and you have no control over any of it,” recalls Cohan, who’s now semiretired and runs retreats for women with breast cancer. “But by bringing in dance, it felt really radical that my health care team was doing my thing, not the other way around.”
Patients living with disease need these moments of escape. It’s not always just about feelings, Cohan said, but physical relaxation. “Sometimes it’s just about remembering how to move consciously. When I was having surgery, I didn’t just dance to relax myself. I wanted my entire surgical team to be relaxed.”
For Rynders, every time she dances with her patients, she’s reminded of her sister and the comfort she was able to give her when no amount of medicine would make things better.
“We don’t always need to be fixed by things,” she said. “Sometimes we just need to be present with one another and be with each other. And sometimes, the best way to do that is by dancing till the tears roll down your cheeks.”
