Terry Davidson suffers from motor neurone disease and has used a wheelchair for the past year – but she can still dance. That’s thanks to the Lebed Method, a theurapeutic exercise and movement programme. The method is the latest complementary therapy to be offered by the Trinity Hospice, in South London, where Davidson is an outpatient. This year’s Times Christmas Appeal is in aid of Trinity and other such hospices that will benefit through the national charity, Help the Hospices.

Complementary therapies have become a well-established feature of hospice care in the past ten years. The Lebed Method is particularly suited to palliative care because it uses gentle dance moves to help restore flexibility, range of motion and balance, and to help patients to remain mobile and independent for longer.

Patients blow soap bubbles

Music helps to make the carefully structured movements of Lebed feel effortless. Rather than teaching formal deep breathing exercises, patients blow soap bubbles to Dean Martin songs, so that people breathe well into the lungs without having to think about it. In the synchronised dance routines – think of New York! New York! – props such as hats, canes and Hawaiian garlands provide a distraction from pain.

Julia Williams, the therapist who introduced Lebed classes to the Trinity Hospice, says: “Patients sometimes remark that Lebed is easier than a physio class, but actually it’s harder. Everything can be so geared to ill-health that it’s important to have a form of exercise that’s both therapeutic and enjoyable yet isn’t hard work or boring.”

The method was designed in the late Seventies in the United States by a family of doctors and dancers whose mother was suffering from breast cancer.

It’s a regimen that seems to be working for Davidson, 50, who started Lebed classes this summer. She’s already noticed an improvement in her circulation, mobility and breathing. Four years ago she was told she had motor neurone disease, which causes nerve degeneration and muscle wasting, and is progressive and incurable. Since then she has gone through some “low patches”, but she is determined to stay positive.

Lebed gives emotional help

She still works as an audio-visual technician in a boys’ comprehensive and manages to live on her own. She has a carer who comes in every morning to help her get ready for work. For the past year she has attended a daycare centre at Trinity as an outpatient. She also spent a short time there as an inpatient while her house was adapted for her condition.

Davidson is convinced that the classes have helped her physically and emotionally: “In a wheelchair you can get very stiff; the circulation in my legs is very poor. The exercises definitely help with that and in keeping me more mobile generally. It feels great to give my upper body a workout without too much strain, because I have to heave myself around using my shoulders quite a bit. I also think the breathing exercises keep stretching my lung capacity a little bit farther.”

Christine West, the chair of the Association of Complementary Therapies in Hospice and Palliative Care, says: “Complementary therapies lend themselves very well to being integrated into palliative care. They are from the same ethos and both work in a holistic way. Symptoms such as nerve pain, breathing difficulties, anxiety and insomnia can be powerfully addressed by complementary therapies.”

For Davidson, the best thing about Lebed classes is that you can’t help but smile. “It has helped me to stay positive,” she says. “When I’ve had a bad week I go to the hospice feeling a bit low and tired, but by the end I feel a lot brighter and that feeling lasts.”

For more on the Lebed Method visit www.focusonhealing.net/

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