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Mounting Evidence “Yoga may help prevent diseases across the board because the root cause of 70 to 90 percent of all disorders is stress,” says Narayanan. Yoga increases the body’s ability to successfully respond to stress by activating the parasympathetic nervous system, which slows the heart and lowers blood pressure. That in turn suppresses sympathetic activity, reducing the amount of stress hormones in the body. Studies collected on PubMed.


gov demonstrate that yoga has been found to help manage hypertension, osteoporosis, body weight, physical fi tness, anxiety, depression, diabetes, reproductive functions and pregnancy, among other issues. Studies at California’s Preventive Medicine Research Institute have tracked amelioration of heart disease. A growing body of research is validating yoga’s benefi ts for cancer patients, including at the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center. A small study at Norway’s University of Oslo suggests that yoga even alters gene expression, indicating it may induce health benefi ts on a molecular level.


Cultural Challenges “For yoga to be effective, a regular practice must be implemented, which is challenging in a culture where people can’t sit for long without an electronic device. It’s more than just popping pills,” says Narayanan. McCall says, “Even if people can commit to just a few minutes of yoga practice a day, if they keep it up the benefi ts can be enormous.” “There are no sales reps telling doctors to use yoga therapy like there are for pharmaceuticals,” remarks Narayanan, and until yoga is funded by health insurance, it will be challenging to gain full acceptance in mainstream medicine. Another barrier is certifi cation


standards. The International Association of Yoga Therapists (iayt.org) and the Council for Yoga Accreditation International (cyai.org) are both beginning to offer certifi cations for therapy training programs and therapists. Narayanan is hopeful that certifi cation could lead to yoga being covered by insurance.


September 2015 17


Any physical exercise done with breath awareness becomes yoga; anything done without the breath is just a physical practice.


~Rajan Narayaran


Medical school curricula have started shifting to embrace complementary approaches to wellness, with many textbooks now including information on mind/body therapies. The Principles and Practices of Yoga in Healthcare, co- edited by Sat Bir Khalsa, Lorenzo Cohen, McCall and Shirley Telles and due out in 2016, is the fi rst professional-level, medical textbook on yoga therapy. “Yoga has been proven to treat many conditions, yet yoga teachers don’t treat conditions, we treat individuals,” says McCall. “Yoga therapy is not a one-size-fi ts-all prescription because different bodies and minds, with different abilities and weaknesses, require individualized approaches.” While medical research is working


to grant yoga more legitimacy among doctors, policymakers and the public, McCall says, “I believe these studies are systematically underestimating how powerful yoga can be. Science may tell us that it decreases systolic blood pressure and cortisol secretion


and increases lung capacity and serotonin levels, but that doesn’t begin to capture the totality of what yoga is.”


Meredith Montgomery, a registered yoga teacher, publishes Natural Awakenings of Mobile/Baldwin, AL (HealthyLivingHealthyPlanet.com).


When Yoga Can Help


4 Addictions 4 Anxiety spectrum disorders 4 Back pain 4 Cancer 4 Depression 4 Diabetes 4 Endocrine issues 4 Heart disease 4 Hypertension 4 Mental health conditions 4 Metabolic syndrome


4 Musculoskeletal and neuromuscular complaints


4 Neurological and immune disorders


4 Pregnancy issues


4 Premenstrual syndrome, perimenopausal symptoms


4 Respiratory issues 4 Weight management


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