Is yoga: a complementary and Alternative Medicine

Two new surveys show that while the overall use of complementary health approaches has remained relatively stable over the years at 34%, certain types are rapidly gaining popularity, especially yoga. Other common complementary practices are taking dietary supplements, doing tai chi and qi gong, meditating and getting chiropractic care.

More and more children are also doing yoga, the survey finds, and they typically use it for ailments like back or neck pain, nerve conditions and anxiety. Interestingly, the majority of children didn’t just practice yoga for exercise, but for meditation and deep breathing. Other new research is showing that when kids practice mindfulness and meditation, they gain a range of health benefits from more self-control to higher math scores.

“The low cost and the ability to practice in one’s own home may contribute to yoga’s growing popularity,” the authors write. “Furthermore, public school systems are beginning to incorporate yoga into their fitness programs, which may accelerate use by children in the future.”

Even though many complementary practices are ancient in other countries, it’s still relatively new in the United States. Medical institutions are increasingly willing to meet patients halfway with therapies that won’t cause harm, as long as practices are safe and don’t ignore the need for conventional medicine and pharmaceuticals when necessarily. In January 2014, the Cleveland Clinic opened a Chinese herbal therapy clinic, and experts at the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota say the appetite for more integrative medicine in the hospital setting is growing. “Acupuncture is a huge practice [here],” says Dr. Brent Baur, director of the Mayo Clinic Complementary and Integrative Medicine Program. “Right now our demand for acupuncture outstrips our ability to meet that demand probably three to one. We can’t even come close to keeping up.”

“I think [interest] is being propelled by economics because our health care system is in such desperate trouble,” says Dr. Andrew Weil, founder of the Arizona Center for Integrative Medicine and a pioneer of integrative medicine in the U.S. “The great promise of integrative medicine is that it can lower costs while increasing outcomes. It does that by emphasizing lifestyle medicine and by bringing into the mainstream techniques that do not involve expensive technology.”

In a World Health Organization survey of 129 countries, 80% recognize the use of acupuncture. The U.S. may be catching up; other research shows that about four in 10 U.S. adults and one in nine kids use some form of complementary and alternative medicine.

In 2007, The National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health published a survey deeming yoga as one of the most commonly used complementary and alternative medicine modalities in the United States. Since then, studies about yoga have evolved and scores of clinical trials have been conducted. Have a look at the following short list of links if you’re the studious type or you’re looking for reassurance that with yoga, you’re not barking up the wrong tree. Science backs up what alternative and complementary healers have known for generations: yoga works.

• Yoga, Stress, and Healthy Women
• Validating the use of yoga therapy for chronic low back pain
• Yoga as an Alternative and Complementary Approach for Stress Management: A Systematic Review
• The therapeutic value of yoga in neurological disorders
• Yoga as an Alternative and Complementary Approach for Stress Management: A Systematic Review

If you don’t feel like reading those articles or chasing down article on your own, we’ll sum them up: yoga as a complementary and alternative medicine (CAM) has a wide range of positive therapeutic effects. We’re delighted that mind-body fitness programs like ours push the envelope of contemporary social norms while maintaining harmony with the latest research in health and exercise sciences. We think it’s essential that athletes and enthusiasts alike know there’s no longer much debate about the role of yoga in health and wellness: yoga is medicine.

What is Yoga Therapy, Though?

It’s important to recognize therapeutic yoga is not exactly the same as heading to the studio to sweat out a hot yoga class or bask in the Zen of a restorative Easy-Like-Sunday-Morning routine. Yoga therapy is defined as the application of yoga postures and practices designed intentionally for the treatment of specific health conditions. Prevention, reduction, and alleviation of structural, physiological, emotional, and spiritual challenges are all desired outcomes of a precise and targeted course of yoga therapy. By understanding and utilizing yoga as an alternative therapy, we can create a series of positive physiological events in our body:

• Strength and flexibility practice will keep muscles and joints healthy.
• Breathing practice will promote and improve respiratory and cardiovascular function.
• Mindfulness practice will promote stress reduction.
• Improvements in sleep patterns will enhance overall well-being, quality of life, and help normalize hormone function.
• Outdoor practice will leverage the serenity of nature and invite us to surrender ourselves to the magic of the present moment.
• Practicing in a stress-free environment will promote self-awareness.

The Conscious Consumer

As active, inquisitive, health-conscious consumers, it’s imperative we integrate therapeutic yoga into our daily habits. We urge you to meditate on the four principles below and consider applying them to your time here on earth. We hope they inform your relationship to yoga and broaden your understanding of yoga as a complete healing and lifestyle system. We believe incorporating these principles into daily life is fundamental for vitality, athleticism, stress management, balance, sustainability, and wellbeing.

1. The human body is a holistic entity comprised of various interrelated dimensions inseparable from one another. The health or illness of any one dimension directly affects the others.
2. Individuals and their needs are unique and must be approached in a way that acknowledges individuality. Each individual practice must be designed and tailored accordingly.
3. Yoga is self-empowering. You are your own healer. Yoga engages the individual in the healing process. Yoga inspires healing to evolve from within (intrinsically) vs. from an outside source (extrinsically). With yoga, autonomy is achieved and the individual is empowered.
4. The quality and state of the individual’s mind is crucial for healing. When the individual has a positive mind-state, healing happens more organically and more quickly. When the mind-state is negative, healing will take longer or may never evolve at all.

We live in a hyper-stressed, unbalanced, and hyper-static world. Some propose we live in a world gone mad and go so far as to call it diseased. If that is indeed true, we propose the remedy: yoga and yogic modalities.

The Healing Path

We acknowledge conventional and contemporary medicine has the ability to heal physical diseases and alleviate psychological disorders. We also acknowledge conventional and contemporary medicine is less effective than complementary practices such as yoga therapy in healing the emotional, intellectual, and natural layers of our human experience, all of which play a direct role in overall health and wellbeing. By exercising the discipline of yoga and applying its holistic model of health, our organic path to superior wellness can and will become manifest.

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