The venue is the back room of a health food shop in a bleak, grey mall off Washington’s outer ring road, near the Credit Union and the dollar bargain store. First you hear the noise from the jangling of coin belts around swinging hips and the tribal whoops of encouragement. Then you see a mass of swaying skirts and veils.

But this is no ordinary dance class. Many of the women here have achieved personal miracles after years of suffering from health problems. Some are looking for answers that the conventional US medical system is either unable or unwilling to give. And others are, quite literally, belly dancing for babies.

This joyous band of sisters — from teenagers to grandmothers — are disciples of the charismatic Dr Sunyatta Amen, advocate of alternative medicine, vegetarianism and belly dancing.

“My grandfather was the healer for his village in the Caribbean — what the doctor cannot fix there you go to the medicine man for,” she says.

She trained in conventional medicine but, with a vegan dad who ran a health food shop in Harlem and a Jamaican-Cuban family who loved to dance, her roots were pulling her elsewhere. “Belly dancing is a dance of fertility,” she says. “The movements mimic conception and childbirth as well as traditional women’s jobs like carrying a pot of water on your head. It helps the menstrual cycle, fibroids and the symptoms of menopause.”

Last year seven women in the class had babies, including Sunyatta, who danced the whole nine months of pregnancy. Four of those suffered from fibroids — benign tumours that grow within the wall of the uterus — or other complications. One of them is Pamela Ouwigho, resplendent in an ornate belly-dancing costume. She proudly passes her seven-month-old daughter around the class, her own little miracle.

A committed dancer and member of the ten-strong class troop Goddess Hips, the 30-year-old had suffered one miscarriage before getting pregnant again. Her doctor told her the pregnancy was “high risk” because she had severe fibroids which can cause miscarriage or early onset of labour. But Pamela believed belly dancing helped her to understand her body, in particular her uterus.

So did Carmen Hines, six months pregnant, serenely swirling her veil around her unborn child. The office worker and waitress had a history of cervical problems before joining the class. “My doctor thought I would have a lot of problems,” says Carmen, 29. “He said ‘don’t be disappointed if you do not get pregnant’.”

Another dancer, Ayanna McNeil, 31, had been trying unsuccessfully to conceive for a year before starting the class. Her doctor told her she just had to wait. “Sunyatta talked about how isolating some areas of the body would benefit the reproductive organs. Within two months of starting belly dancing I conceived. I attribute a lot of that to the work I was doing in class. When I was giving birth I used some of the movements she taught us. My labour and delivery were amazing — almost pain free.”

Belly dancing is said to be the oldest form of dance, traditionally performed for other women, often during fertility rites. Dancers go barefoot to be in physical touch with the Earth. Sunyatta advocates that dancing is done in conjunction with a “dancer’s diet” — for many a radical move from junk food to whole grains and raw ingredients. The combination has been life-transforming for Abiola Idris, 34. She suffered ten years of menstrual cramps, heavy bleeding and sickness. It was so bad that she often had to miss work. Six months after joining the dance class and changing her diet the symptoms were gone. “In two years I have lost 20lb (9kg),” she says. “Going to the gym is so mechanical; here we have fun, bonding and unity.”

Elaine Rice-Fells comes in from the bitter cold, smiles at the other dancers’ children and peels off her winter layers. The 50-year-old mother and grandmother had been fasting for 16 days as part of her attempt at self-healing. “I was diagnosed with fibroids in October and I’m working to a 100 per cent raw food diet and belly dancing to see if it will make a difference,” she says. “I have refused conventional treatment.”

Surgery is the traditional treatment for fibroids — a myomectomy to remove fibroids without taking away the healthy tissue of the uterus, or a hysterectomy to remove the uterus.

Although Elaine, a government worker in Washington, does have health insurance, the patient is always left with a percentage of the bill to pay, in her case $300 (£158) for the diagnostic scan alone. About 43 million people in the US have no health insurance. A standard infertility evaluation costs about $2,000; the average cost for IVF treatment is $12,400.

Ayanna, a social worker, found that by taking a year’s leave from work to have her baby, her health insurance ended after 60 days. She faced a bill of $618 a month for her and her daughter to be covered.

“The majority of people that come to see me who have issues with fibroids do not have health insurance and if they do it does not cover the alternative options,” says Sunyatta, who also presents The Bush Medicine Show on local radio.

Clara Tolbert, the organiser of a uterine fibroid support group in Maryland, a suburb of Washington, has taken up belly dancing at 59. “I had fibroids and got rid of them naturally by changing my diet and using Chinese herbs. But I had to spend thousands of dollars,” she says.

Bryan Cowan, a fibroids expert at the University of Mississippi and an advocate of healthy living, is sceptical about the healing powers of dance and diet. “The difficulty is this: you cannot show up with uterine fibroids and say I’m going to be vegetarian to get rid of them. You already have them,” he says. “Eighty per cent of the time a myomectomy can solve their problem and 55 per cent go on to get pregnant.”

But Kevin Kim, the assistant professor of radiology and surgery and director of gynaecologic intervention at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland, sympathises with the wish of many women to avoid surgery. He is heading research, also being performed in London, to treat fibroids with MRI-guided ultrasound, by which wave energy goes through the abdominal wall to destroy the fibroids.

He hopes this therapy can ultimately help a lot more patients in America, regardless of whether they have health insurance.

Back at the two-hour, $10 class in Washington, Shannon Lewis, 25, is dancing in defiance of her family history. Her mother, grandmother and great aunts have all had hysterectomies for fibroids; cousins and aunts already have them.

Shannon is hoping that following Sunyatta Amen’s path might just save her.

For further information on belly-dancing classes, www.bdancer.com or www.pineapple.uk.com