A few years ago, the organizers of one of the largest U.S. exercise programs for people with Parkinson’s disease realized they had a problem: Most of the students were White.
“We’re always asking who’s not in the room, and why are they not in the room?” said David Leventhal, program director for Dance for PD with the Mark Morris Dance Group in New York City.
Leventhal and his team went to work. They hired more instructors who spoke Spanish or Mandarin and translated marketing materials, which boosted the number of participants from Hispanic and ethnically Chinese communities. But efforts to recruit Black participants haven’t been nearly as effective, Leventhal said.
Exercise is considered fundamental to the treatment of Parkinson’s, with studies showing it can alleviate symptoms of the disease and improve mobility, flexibility and balance. But people who run Parkinson’s exercise programs in a handful of U.S. cities describe great difficulty in recruiting Black people.
“In Parkinson’s, movement is medicine. So if you’re not figuring out how to engage communities in movement, it’s basically like withholding medication,” Leventhal said. “If this were a pill, there would be an uproar.”
A small study by researchers at Yale University showed that after six months of exercise, participants’ dopamine-producing neurons — the kind destroyed by Parkinson’s — grew healthier.
Research published by a British medical journal this year encouraged a “paradigm shift” in which exercise would be “individually prescribed as medicine” to patients at an early stage of the disease.
That’s why people like Eric Johnson, founder and CEO of Movement Revolution, are frustrated. Johnson said his Chicago-area initiative offered a free six-month exercise program for Parkinson’s patients and increased marketing in the Black community but got little traction.
“It was a challenge,” he said. “I’ll be honest.”
One big hurdle: Many Black people…
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