Dance as Medicine: Clinical, Physiological, and Social Perspectives

Dance is increasingly recognized as a form of medicine that can be integrated into clinical care, rehabilitation, and community health to promote physical, psychological, cognitive, and social well-being. As a multimodal intervention combining physical movement, cognitive engagement, emotional expression, creativity, and social interaction, dance is being incorporated into therapeutic programs across a wide range of clinical and community settings. Growing evidence supports the use of dance-based interventions to improve health outcomes for individuals living with neurological, psychiatric, cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, and age-related conditions, while community dance initiatives have emerged as valuable approaches for promoting healthy aging, disease prevention, and social connectedness. Despite these advances, the motor-control, biomechanical, and physiological mechanisms underlying dance’s therapeutic effects remain incompletely understood, limiting the field’s ability to translate these benefits into evidence-based clinical practice.

While dance is increasingly utilized across clinical and community settings, the precise pathways explaining its therapeutic benefits remain poorly understood. This Research Topic prioritizes contributions that ground clinical and functional observations in the underlying motor-control, bio-mechanical, and physiological mechanisms of dance, in keeping with the Movement Science section’s focus on the mechanisms of movement behavior. This Research Topic aims to address: What motor and physiological processes drive the health benefits of dance across populations? How can dance interventions be designed and measured to capture these mechanisms? How do mechanistic insights inform rehabilitation and clinical translation? Recent advances in wearable sensing, motion capture, and movement analysis now make it possible to quantify these processes in real-world settings. This collection complements our companion Research Topic, “Dance, Brain, and Cognition”, which addresses the neural and cognitive dimensions of dance; here we center the motor, bio-mechanical, and physiological mechanisms of clinical and functional benefit.

To gather interdisciplinary insights across psychology, movement science, rehabilitation, and neuroscience, we welcome articles addressing, but not limited to, the following themes:

• Clinical applications of dance for the prevention, treatment, and rehabilitation of neurological, psychiatric, cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, and chronic health conditions.
• Physiological mechanisms underlying the therapeutic effects of dance, such as psychological, cognitive, motor, and physical activity-related processes.
• Technology-enhanced approaches for the design, delivery, monitoring, and evaluation of dance-based interventions, such as wearable sensors, motion capture, artificial intelligence, virtual reality, and digital health platforms.
• Psychological and social outcomes of dance participation, including mental health, resilience, social connectedness, loneliness, self-efficacy, and quality of life.
• Comparative effectiveness studies evaluating dance relative to other exercise, rehabilitation, or psychosocial interventions.
• Methodological advances in the assessment, standardization, and reporting of dance-based interventions, including intervention fidelity, outcome measurement, and clinical trial design.
• Personalized and precision approaches to dance interventions, considering individual differences in health status, functional capacity, motivation, and treatment response.