How Yoga Helps Medical Conditions: Symptom Improvement

by Baxter with Nina

Painted Composition Design for Medicine
by Gustav Klimt

Last week in my post How Yoga Helps with Medical Conditions: Prevention, I discussed how to use yoga for prevention. Today I’m going to focus on how you can use yoga to improve symptoms. To put it simply, this means you are using yoga to:  

1. Relieve symptoms caused by a medical condition without curing it. In this case, although you’re not curing the medical condition, you’re using yoga to achieve either temporary or long-term improvement of symptoms. For example, someone with chronic low back pain from a ruptured disc can use yoga very effectively to reduce or relieve pain. But because yoga cannot repair the ruptured disc, the underlying condition isn’t cured and may occasionally still produce pain.  

2. Relieve symptoms and cure a medical condition with yoga alone. This means that you are using yoga to resolve the symptoms caused by your underlying condition but you are also using it to resolve the underlying disorder itself, so it is unlikely to return. For example, someone with stress-related headaches could use yoga’s pain management techniques to reduce headache pain and yoga’s stress management techniques to eliminate the headaches themselves.

Now let’s take a closer look at these two different ways you can use yoga for improving symptoms.  

Yoga for Symptom Improvement Alone

Yoga is extremely effective for providing symptom improvement for a large number of medical conditions, even if it does not lead to a cure. Typically you use a combination of tools for symptom improvement, including asana (active, gentle, restorative and supported inversions), stress management tools, and equanimity tools. Since yoga has the potential to improve the symptoms of just about any medical condition, here are just a few examples:

1. Respiratory conditions, such as emphysema and chronic cough. See How Yoga Fosters Respiratory System Health for information on using yoga for respiratory system health.
2. Chronic pain, such as chronic low back pain and fibromyalgia, and post recovery from surgery. See How Yoga Helps with Pain for using yoga for pain management.
3. Immune-related conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis, multiple sclerosis, and HIV/Aids. See How Yoga Helps Your Immune System for using yoga to support the immune system and How Yoga Helps with Pain for pain relief.
4. Digestive conditions that are aggravated by stress, such as irritable bowel syndrome and peptic ulcer disease. See How Yoga Helps Your Digestive System for information on using yoga to support your digestive system.
5. Cardiovascular conditions, such as coronary artery disease and irregular heart rhythms. (Of course, while avoiding practices that could aggravate the condition, such as vigorous styles of asana practice, long-held standing poses, and full inversions.)
6. Emotional illness, such as anxiety and depression.
7. Brain conditions that lead to worsening cognitive function, such as early stage dementia and mini strokes as a complication of diabetes.
8. Palliative care (including pain management and stress reduction) for those who do not want to use western medical options, such as for end of life care.

Yoga for Symptom Improvement with Curing 

Although there are actually very few conditions that yoga can cure by itself (most complete healing with yoga occurs when yoga is used as an adjunct to other forms of care), there are five categories of medical conditions that yoga alone can potentially cure:

1. Musculoskeletal Conditions. These include acute minor injuries such as common sprains and strains, and a certain subset of more significant acute injuries, including back and neck pain. Using asanas for physical benefits combined with mindfulness techniques and stress management techniques can promote tissue healing.
2. Stress-Related Headaches. For some people, yoga’s stress management tools can resolve stress headaches.
3. Unhealthy Breathing Patterns. Yoga’s tools for cultivating the health of your respiratory system can reverse some abnormal breathing patterns.
4. Stress-Related Digestive Problems. Stress management techniques can resolve some minor digestive problems that are caused by stress.
5. Emotional Conditions. For certain people with mild forms of chronic stress, anxiety, and depression, a combination of practicing asanas for emotional wellbeing with yoga’s stress management and equanimity tools can resolve emotional problems. 

For now, our evidence on the ability of yoga to “cure” many of these conditions is anecdotal (reported by individuals not proved in a scientific study). However, we have seen so many people benefit from using yoga to help with these conditions that until we do have studies to back us up, we recommend giving yoga a try. 

In general, however, before you attempt to address a particular medical condition with yoga, I recommend that you get guidance from both an experienced yoga teacher or yoga therapist and your doctor. And keep in mind that unlike when you have been prescribed an antibiotic to cure a specific infection, you can’t use yoga for two weeks to cure these conditions and then just discard it. So for many of these conditions, part of a “yoga cure” involves ongoing maintenance.

For example, if you successfully used your yoga tools to heal an acute bout of lower back pain, your use of yoga to maintain your improvement would not stop there, as returning to your old habits that may have contributed to the back pain in the first place could bring it back on. So from that point on, you would use your yoga practice to maintain the healing you have achieved and reduce the chances of re-injury. 

Finally, before pronouncing yourself “cured,” we recommend that you monitor your condition for a reasonable amount of time, say 1-2 years, especially if you are dealing with a more complex issue, such a severe low back pain or depression.

In fact, for many of these conditions, yoga alone may not be enough to bring about a cure. So you may need to combine yoga with strategies that your doctor recommends, such as specific physical therapy exercises for that ankle or appropriate anti-depressant medications for that depression. This is especially true for many emotional conditions. For emotional conditions that are more severe or that just do not seem to responding quickly to your practice, I strongly recommend that you combine yoga with other forms of treatment, such as therapy or medication. 

In these situations, yoga is acting as an adjunct to your western medical treatment, which I will get into in more detail next week. But as I mentioned in How Yoga Helps with Medical Conditions: Prevention, yoga is a great complement to western medicine. The ultimate goal is your ongoing wellness! 

The Bottom Line 

Keep in keep in mind that there are no guarantees for using yoga either for improving symptoms or curing a medical condition. However, the mounting evidence that yoga at the very least improves symptoms for many conditions should encourage you to give it a try!

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Using Stress Management Techniques for Medical Conditions

by Baxter and Nina

Dandelion by Melina Meza

If you're suffering from a stress-related disease, such as heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, obesity and digestive disorders, reducing chronic stress can be very beneficial. Stress management can also help with emotional disorders—including anxiety and depression—that are caused by or worsened by stress.

Because stress management helps reduce inflammation, reducing chronic stress can also help with inflammation-related problems, including most forms of arthritis, as well as certain gastrointestinal conditions, such as celiac disease and leaky gut syndrome. 

In general, yoga stress management techniques can be preventive medicine, as lowering overall stress levels may reduce your chances of even developing stress-related illnesses. They could also be curative because spending significant amounts of time in Rest and Digest keeps your immune system and repair systems functioning optimally. Finally, you can use stress management as a palliative technique to help you cope with the stress of living with a chronic illness, improving the quality of your life.

This provides some basic tips for practicing stress management when you have a medical condition. We'll address physical disorders first and then discuss emotional disorders. See The Relaxation Response and Yoga for general information about using stress management when you're healthy. 

Cautions: Generally stress management techniques are very safe. However, meditation is generally not recommended for depression or anxiety, because sitting alone with your thoughts can cause you to spiral downward. So avoid meditation unless you have a teacher experienced at working with your condition who can guide you. People who have uncontrolled high blood pressure should not practice full or partial inverted poses. 

For Physical Disorders

For digestive disorders, for periods without active symptoms, practice a well-rounded stress reducing sequence, combining active poses, both dynamic and static, and restorative poses, as well as meditation and breath work. For periods with active symptoms, stay with gentle poses, including easy dynamic poses and restorative poses, that do not create pressure on your abdomen (for example, no Cobra or Locust pose), and avoid twists. But you can practice any stress management techniques that work well for you, including focused relaxation, quieting breath practices, and meditation. For most digestive issues, you can include supported inversions. However, for hiatal hernias and gastro-esophageal reflux (GERD), symptoms will often worsen with inverted poses, so you should avoid them. 

For inflammation-related conditions, for the non-asana part of your practice, you can practice whatever stress management techniques work best for you. For arthritis of the lower back on down to the feet, supported inverted poses can be particularly helpful. 

For cardiovascular disorders, all of the stress management tools can be helpful, particularly meditation, calming breath practices, restorative poses, and focused relaxation. Just be aware that for certain conditions, such as congestive heart failure, lying flat in Savasana may bring on symptoms. In such cases, elevating your head and chest may relieve the symptoms. the head and chest may permit you to do Savasana safely. 

For cardiovascular diseases for which your doctor has warned you about situations that may increase your blood pressure, such as coronary artery disease and risk of stroke, practice supported inversion only if they do not cause an increase in your blood pressure. (Check your blood pressure with a home monitor immediately before trying a short hold of supported inversion and check again immediately afterwards to see if your numbers go high. Discuss with your doctor if you are uncertain how to proceed.)

One of the significant issues for people with just about any chronic is that the illness itself if a significant daily stressor. Examples are cardiovascular disease, diabetes and related conditions (metabolic syndrome), autoimmune diseases such as and rheumatoid arthritis, to name just a few. For all these conditions, you can use whichever stress management techniques make you feel better and do not aggravate your symptoms. Obviously, if you are seriously ill, practices that are physically undemanding, such as meditation, breath work, and focused relaxation (which you can do lying down as well as sitting) will be more accessible to you.

For Emotional Disorders

Because emotional disorders, including depression and anxiety, are either caused by or worsened by stress, practicing stress management for these medical conditions is extremely beneficial and may make you feel better, either immediately or with consistent practice over time. 

However, many stress management practices, such as restorative yoga, focused relaxation, and mediation are typically practiced with closed eyes. If this causes you to become more depressed or anxious, try practicing with your eyes open instead, keeping them softly focused. If trying to concentrate on your breath or physical sensations causes your symptoms to worsen, try using a mantra, a formal meditation practice, or a recorded relaxation practice that employs vivid imagery.

Anxiety. Because people with anxiety often have a hard time staying still, we recommend that you begin with a strong asana sequence to tire yourself out a bit before trying stress management techniques. Supported Inverted poses are particularly beneficial for anxiety, as the physical orientation of the poses triggers the Relaxation Response and concentration isn’t as essential. But if you find other techniques effective, use whichever ones you prefer. 

Lying on your back with your front body exposed can increase anxiety in some people, so for you prone restorative poses, such as Child’s pose, may be better than supine poses, such as Reclined Cobbler’s pose. If Savasana on your back creates anxiety, try lying on your belly or on your side instead, or skip the pose entirely and do Legs Up the Wall pose instead. 

Depression. For clinical depression, which has symptoms of lethargy and despair, if lying or sitting still causes symptoms to worsen, try a mindful asana practice with either short holds in static poses or slow dynamic poses. For restorative poses, choose backbend shapes, such as Reclined Cobbler’s pose, which can be uplifting, rather than forward bend shapes. In Savasana, try a supported version, with your torso lifted and your chest open, rather than lying flat.

For agitated depression, follow our suggestions for anxiety, adding in restorative backbends if those work for you.

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Friday Practice Pointers: Get a Diagnosis!

by Baxter

Self Portrait with the Portrait of Doctor Farill by Frida Kahlo*

As I was reviewing all the information that we have shared with you over the years on our blog regarding yoga for medical conditions, I was struck by the fact that I had not clearly and unequivocally stated the most obvious caution of all. It was easy to forget this most important caution when there is so much positive information coming out each week on studies showing yoga’s benefit for a wide range of medical conditions, from osteoporosis to Parkinson’s Disease and post-cancer treatment. I’ve even shared with you fairly clear ways to think about the use of yoga tools for medical conditions- as preventative, curative, maintenance, supportive or palliative, and rehabilitative (see 5 Ways Yoga Can Affect Your Health). And we have written about applying yoga tools for conditions here ranging from bunions to low back pain and diabetes. 

But there is one caution that is crucial for all of this: 

If you feel that you are developing some medical condition or illness, you should be evaluated by the appropriate health care provider—be it an orthopedic surgeon for your shoulder pain or a psychologist for your feelings of depression—and get an accurate diagnosis! 

This might seem like common sense. And yet, over and over again, I meet people who are using yoga to address a health issue who have never even been to their family doctor, let alone a specialist, to find out if their suspicions about what is going on are correct. There is an old saying “The doctor who treats himself has a fool for a patient.” You are doubly or triply foolish if you are not a doctor and doing the same thing! Also, despite their best intentions and offers of help, your yoga teacher is not trained nor licensed to diagnose what ails you, even common things like low back pain that might seem their bread and butter. Even those who are certified in the new field of yoga therapy are not permitted to diagnosis your injury, illness or disorder (see Drawing a Line in the Sand: Where Yoga Teachers Should Not Go).

I certainly understand the reluctance of many to go see a doctor when you may not have health insurance, or have a plan that covers very little of the cost that might be involved in finding out what is going on. But a delay in finding out what is going on or making an incorrect self-diagnosis could leave you worse off in the long run and cost you even more. So, here is what I recommend:

1. If you think you are becoming ill (obvious exceptions are common colds and such), see a board-certified medical doctor doctor as soon as you can and get an accurate diagnosis. 
2. If you are injured and are not improving in 4-6 weeks, do the same.
3. Once you have a diagnosis, ask your doctor or health care expert if yoga is safe to add to any treatment they recommend (see Talking to Your Doctor).
4. Once you have a diagnosis, discuss what you know about your condition with your yoga teacher or yoga therapist, and ask them to help you craft a plan using yoga to assist in supporting better health and healing. 
5. If you don’t already have a teacher or yoga therapist, look for one in your community with experience, preferably working your specific diagnosis. 
6. Once you have a diagnosis and clearance from your health team, consider using the recommendations we make here on this blog for your specific issues. But even if you choose to try out some of our suggestions, I still strongly recommend you work with a teacher or yoga therapist when you first start our applying yoga tools, especially if you are newer to yoga.
7. If you are in the midst of a diagnostic work-up and your doctor is okay with you trying or continuing restorative or gentle yoga, then certainly, with appropriate common sense caution, do that. The stress reducing benefits of such practices are typically supportive for just about any condition you might be diagnosed with. 

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6 Strategies for Using Yoga to Help Medical Conditions

by Nina and Baxter

De Jur, Age 57

“So, short of unconsciousness, I feel that there is no condition that yoga could not potentially help with!”

In Baxter’s post Health Problems that Yoga Can't Help With, he made the dramatic statement that he felt there is no condition that yoga could not potentially help with. His reasoning was:

“Yoga certainly can bring our minds and bodies into better balance, and seems to support many of the healing systems in our own bodies in working more efficiently. And, of course, stress management, pain management, and bolstering the immune system via yoga can always help at some level with just about any conceivable health issue we may face, even if you are dying.”

Since then, the two of us have been working on identifying the basic strategies that will provide the help he was describing. These six strategies can be used on their own or in any combination as required by the condition. For example, if you are recovering from cancer, you could work on muscular/skeletal health for weakness, immune system support for healing, and stress management for emotional health.

We want to be clear, however. For the most part, these strategies cannot replace Western medicine. In many cases, what you are doing with the yoga is supporting healing, rehabilitating after treatment, or even just providing relief from pain and comfort care. See 5 Ways Yoga Can Affect Your Health for information on this. (Exceptions might include conditions such as anxiety and insomnia that an be managed and even “cured” by yoga practice.)

For information on the specific health problems you can address with yoga, see Common Minor Problems Yoga Can Help With and Common Serious Problems Yoga Can Help With.

Yoga Strategies for Addressing Health Problems

1. Muscular/Skeletal Health. You can use the asana practice to improve the health of the musculoskeletal system by working on strength, flexibility, balance, and agility.

Improving muscle strength can help with any condition that causes weakness, such as sarcopenia, Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, post-broken bone recovery with secondary weakness from disuse, or having been bedridden as a result of illness or surgery. Improving bone strength can help with osteoporosis and osteopenia (see Yoga and Strength: An Overview).

Improving flexibility can help with any condition that causes stiffness, such as osteoarthritis or Parkinson’s Disease (see Yoga and Flexibility: An Overview).

Improving balance can help with any condition that reduces this physical skill, including frailty from aging and inactivity, Multiple Sclerosis, Parkinson’s Disease, peripheral neuropathy from diabetes, and poor eyesight (see Yoga and Balance: An Overview).

Improving agility can help with any condition that affects nimbleness and response time, including any condition that affects balance in general as well as the slowing of brain-body nerve conduction resulting from aging (see Yoga and Agility: An Overview).

Overall the asana practice improves posture, which help problems caused by poor physical alignment, such as Carpal Tunnel Syndrome and back pain.

2. Immune System Support. Using yoga to support the immune system can help foster healing from a wide range of illnesses, including post severe flu, auto-immune conditions, such as rheumatoid arthritis, and cancer, and can boost immune system functioning in those with immune system disorders, such as HIV/AIDS and adrenal insufficiency. See Yoga and the Immune System.

3. Stress Management. Yoga’s stress management tools allow you to reduce chronic stress, helping to prevent and/or manage stress-related diseases, including heart disease, hypertension, and digestive disorders. See About Stress: Acute vs. Chronic and The Relaxation Response and Yoga for information. Stress management can also help with emotional disorders—including anxiety and depression—that are caused or exacerbated by stress.

Stress management also helps reduce inflammation, potentially helping inflammation-related problems, including as most forms of arthritis, as well as gastrointestinal conditions such as celiac disease and leaky gut syndrome (see Chronic Inflammation and Yoga).

4. Pain Management. Yoga’s pain management techniques allow you to provide relief for a wide range of conditions that cause chronic pain, from migraines to severe osteoarthritis, fibromyalgia, and cancer. See How and Why Yoga Helps with Pain and Yoga for Pain Management for more information.

5. Cardiovascular and Circulatory System Health. You can use yoga practices to maintain or improve circulation in your cardiovascular system, which is essential for heart health, as well as the health of your other organs (including your brain). Reducing chronic stress also helps prevent heart disease, stroke, arrhythmias, and other circulatory system problems. See Heart Health and Yoga and About Yoga for Heart Health and Circulation for more information.

6. Respiratory Health. Yoga asanas, breath awareness, and pranayama can help improve lung function to foster general health and can help with respiratory diseases, such as mild asthma and COPD. See The Respiratory System and Yoga for more information.

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5 Ways Yoga Can Affect Your Health

by Baxter

Roots by Melina Meza

On this blog, we often address the health benefits of yoga, from its ability to support a generally healthy lifestyle to specific therapeutic benefits that yoga brings to a whole array of injuries, diseases, and conditions (see Common Minor Problems That Yoga Can Help With and Common Serious Problems That Yoga Help With). Therefore, how we are using yoga for health benefits can vary tremendously. So I feel it will be helpful to have a clear framework to describe yoga’s various roles in affecting our health. This will give us a better understanding of what yoga actually has the power to do—or not—for different types of conditions.

Within the world of yoga, Yoga Therapy is a rapidly emerging specialty. It is interesting to consider the origins of the word “therapy.” It comes originally from the Greek language, and literally means “healing” or “curing.” As I considered how yoga fits into modern concepts of healing and treatment for conditions and ailments, I came up five different categories. 

1. Preventative Medicine. Yoga can be “health promotion activity” that can prevent disease and create an overall sense of well-being. In choosing to practice yoga, you may not be targeting a specific disease or condition, but rather in a more general way you are promoting your general health and supporting a sense of well-being. We could say that in this way, yoga is acting as a form of primary prevention, addressing your overall health before any problems develop. Yoga can also be a form of secondary prevention for specific conditions that are present in a latent form or a presently asymptomatic, but if were left unaddressed, could progress to a more serious form. High blood pressure is one example of this. If we apply yoga to high blood pressure and it helps to normalize our blood pressure numbers, it could prevent the development of more serious conditions like Coronary Artery Disease and heart attacks. In this case, ongoing yoga practice will hopefully prevent future disability from the more serious consequences of untreated high blood pressure. 

2. Curative Medicine. Yoga certainly can help with complete healing, as is often noted with musculoskeletal conditions, such as common sprains and strains, and even more complex issues, such as back and neck pain. In addition, in some individuals, yoga seems to resolve serious issues like anxiety and depression, although it often does so as an “adjunct,” in combination with other forms of treatment. However, unlike an antibiotic prescribed for a specific infection for which it cures, yoga usually is not just used for two weeks and then discarded. So there is an ongoing “maintenance” aspect of yoga that differs from western pharmaceutical treatments. And before prematurely pronouncing yourself “cured,” you might consider monitoring your “cured” conditions for 1 to 5 years as they do with cancer treatment.

3. Maintenance Therapy. Yoga can be helpful as a maintenance treatment for ongoing conditions that are in a remission state. For example, someone with MS can practice yoga between flares of symptoms in order to help maintain the relative symptom-free remission periods. Or someone with asthma during could practice during symptom-free periods with the goal of extending those remission times. During flares, people with these types of conditions might also do a modified, gentle, restorative practice, which would fall into our next category.

4. Supportive or Palliative Therapy. This refers to a therapy that does not treat or improve the underlying condition, but instead increases the patient's comfort. Palliative care often refers to serious or terminal conditions, but is nonetheless related to supportive therapy. As an example, some of my students with chronic low back pain, often from ruptured discs that are not going to heal, benefit dramatically from the pain and stress-relieving aspects of their ongoing yoga practice. And for more serious situations, I think of a student of mine who had Lou Gehrig’s Disease, and used his pranayama and meditation practices even into the last stage of his life with some benefit.

5. Rehabilitative Therapy. Yoga is being used more and more to aid recovery from all sorts of acute conditions, such as following major surgeries to post-heart attack and post-stroke rehabilitation. In such cases, yoga is often introduced for certain periods of time, say two to four months, to accelerate recovery, and hopefully adopted for longer-term maintenance or supportive purposes after that.

Now, you might want to add more categories, or divide some of these into several, but my hope is that this organization, however simple, helps you to think in a clearer fashion about how you apply your yoga to health conditions. 

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Friday Q&A: This Class May Not Be Good for You!

Fir Forest by Gustave Klimt

A reader left this question on our post What Your Yoga Teacher Really Wants to Know:

Q: What if you're a fairly new teacher and someone shares something of the above with you but you don't really feel confident in providing a modification. Like you think, "Yikes! was it x posture or y pose that someone with her condition shouldn't do?" Or "Gosh, I can't remember which poses are contraindicated for that condition!" Have you ever told a student he/she couldn't participate after hearing something they're dealing with?

A: As many of my recent teacher training graduates tell me, this situation comes up all the time for new teachers, or teachers who have not been trained to work therapeutically with problems their students may have. And although there is no one answer on how to address such a dilemma, several responses come to mind, all of which I have used when I was a newer teacher. 

First off, you can be quite honest with your student and explain that you are not well versed in their particular issue but that they can certainly take your class that day if they feel comfortable listening to their own body’s feedback and backing up when they, the student, feel they need to. This does not guarantee that your student will not still get into some troubles, but you are at least honestly letting them know your limitations and openness to them being in class. 

Some students actually have been working with their health conditions and yoga already, so it is worth asking for them to briefly share with you what they know about their condition. Has their healthcare team given them any physical restrictions to observe? Have they been told by other yoga teachers how to modify for their condition? The new teacher then gets an on-the-spot tutorial, and may feel much more willing to have the student participate in the day’s class! 

A new teacher could also tell the student they don’t know specifically what to offer them today but then propose to look up the condition and have some options available in class next time or for a private session (if you are comfortable doing privates). Also, you could encourage them to skip class today and return on a date when you think you will have the needed info, just to be on the safe side. It’s not a bad idea to reiterate that you are most interested in giving them as safe and beneficial an experience as possible in class! 

Then, there is the rare instance when someone shows up for class with a serious issue you don’t know much about, for example, a serious neck issue, while you do know that the class you will be teaching that day includes several poses that will likely be inappropriate for them, such as poses in which students would be bearing weight on their necks. I think that if modifying the entire practice for the student is beyond your budding skills, in these truly infrequent situations, it is proper to state that the class you are about to teach is really not safe for them to do today, ask them to stop up front for a refund, and, if possible, recommend another class for them to try or give them an opportunity to meet for an individual session if you feel you can get some helpful information together to share with them. 

In some cases, it may be the particular style or level of yoga that you are teaching is not appropriate for a person with certain challenges. For example, lets say you are teaching a relatively athletic class and the student has a condition that you don’t know how to accommodate, like acute recovery from heart attack, Fibromyalgia, or Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, to pick just three from our lists in What Your Yoga Teacher Really Wants to Know, you will be doing them a favor if you let them know that your class really isn’t really the best one for them. (Some people have been told that yoga will be beneficial for their condition and then head off to their nearest class, without ever having received an explanation of the different types yoga and which kinds are suitable for someone with their particular needs.) 

I am sure there are other scenarios that may allow the new teacher, in the most transparent and compassionate way possible, to navigate this inevitable situation. If you have had a similar experience and want to share what worked for you as a teacher, or what worked well for you as the student on the other side of this situation, please leave a comment or send an email.

—Baxter

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Common Serious Health Problems that Yoga Can Help With

by Baxter

Falling Water by Melina Meza

Last week I shared with you my list of Common Minor Problems that Yoga Can Help With. Thanks to some of you who wrote in with your ideas. It turns out some of suggestions actually fit better into today’s category, common serious health problems that yoga can help with. For instance, one of our readers mentioned that two of her students with Parkinson’s Disease have benefited from regular yoga practice. Due to the more serious consequences of Parkinson’s, I have that on today’s list of health conditions. And as with the minor health conditions, in some instances we are beginning to understand the underlying why and how that yoga influences these more serious conditions while in other cases, this remains an unsolved mystery. As an example of a condition where we are discovering yoga’s underlying effects, in the Dean Ornish study on Life Style Modification (which included yoga) and Prostate cancer, it was found that the treatment protocol turned on over 500 beneficial genes in study participants. In many other situations, we still need more research as to how the yoga is leading to improvement.

Without further ado, here is my list of common (and maybe a few less common) serious health conditions that yoga helps with (I've divided them into thirteen general categories to make the list more manageable.)

Common Serious Health Problems Yoga Can Help With

1. Cardiovascular Health Problems: Coronary heart disease, hypertension, heart arrhythmias such as atrial fibrillation, stroke prevention and rehabilitation, congestive heart failure, post-heart attack rehabilitation, post-heart surgery.
2. Cancer related Problems: Adjunct practices during cancer treatment and for post-treatment recovery, breast cancer, ovarian cancer, lymphoma.
3. Mental-Emotional Problems: Depression, anxiety, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, neurosis, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, Schizophrenia, ADD/ADHD, eating disorders, Bipolar Disorder.
4. Respiratory Problems: Asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), smoking cessation, Pleural Effusions.
5. Central Nervous System/Neurologic Problems: Parkinson’s Disease, Multiple Sclerosis, some forms of dementia, including Alzheimer’s Disease, seizures, Post-Polio Syndrome, Cerebral Palsy, Guillain-Barré Syndrome, Muscular Dystrophy. 
6. Skeletal Problems: Degenerative Disc Disease (neck and low back), Herniated Disc Disease, Sciatica, significant Osteoarthritis, Rheumatoid Arthritis, significant Scoliosis, Osteopenia and Osteoporosis, post-joint replacement, fall prevention. 
7. Endocrine Problems: Diabetes, Metabolic Syndrome, Hypo- or Hyperthyroidism, obesity.
8. Addiction Problems: Alcoholism and other drug abuse, drug withdrawal.
9. Pain and Fatigue Problems: Chronic Fatigue Syndrome, Fibromyalgia, chronic pain, significant back and neck pain, significant tension and migraine headaches. 
10. Digestive Disorders: Irritable Bowel Syndrome, Inflammatory Bowel Disease (Crohn’s and Ulcerative Colitis), Reflux Disease (GERD). 
11. Kidney and Bladder Problems: kidney failure, Urinary Stress Incontinence, Urinary Bladder Dysfunction.
12. Immune Problems: HIV/AIDS, Tuberculosis. 
13. Women’s Reproductive Problems: Menstrual disorders, Polycystic Ovary Syndrome, complicated pregnancy, infertility (for both Men and Women), pelvic floor pain, pelvic floor dysfunction, vagina prolapse. 

Some of these conditions we have written about here at YFHA, and I am certain I am forgetting a few. There are less common serious conditions we have written about that I have not included, such Ehler-Danlos Syndrome to keep our list to a moderate size. If there are any glaring deficiencies, please let us know and we will update our list. 

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Common Minor Health Problems that Yoga Can Help With

by Baxter

The Sick Doctor by Jehan Georges Vibert

One strong motivator these days for starting a yoga practice is all the publicity about the benefits of yoga for your health. Seems a week doesn’t go by without some new study being published on the benefits of yoga for this health issue or that serious illness. In a few upcoming posts, I plan to address some of the more serious problems that yoga seems to be able to help with, but today I thought I’d start with a genera post about some of the more common minor problems yoga can help with. As Nina reported on a while back in Medical Conditions Benefitted by Yoga, our past blog contributor Dr. Timothy McCall keeps an ongoing list of the conditions that yoga has been shown to help with via scientific studies (see www.drmccall.com).

A quick perusal of Timothy’s list reveals a lot of fairly serious conditions! Since I am interested today in common minor problems, let me state that in compiling my list, I am assuming that the conditions I list are often inconvenient, uncomfortable and potentially disruptive to daily life, and may carry a degree of seriousness for those affected by them. But in their milder forms they are not usually life-threatening or seriously debilitating. There are always exceptions, of course.

My list includes some that you will find on Timothy’s list and a few of my own, which I’ve gleaned from my years of experience working with a wide variety of students. 

Common Minor Problems Yoga Can Help With

1. General body stiffness and body aches, non-specific
2. Mild arthritis
3. Mild muscle weakness from inactivity or general aging
4. Poor balance, not associated with other serious illness
5. Poor agility
6. Morning stiffness associated with mild osteoarthritis
7. Posture-related problems and kyphosis
8. Mild back and neck pain
9. Elbow pain
10. Mild scoliosis
11. Bunions, flat feet and overly high arches
12. Pelvic floor health (including incontinence)
13. Leg cramps
14. Edema and varicose veins
15. Restless Leg Syndrome
16. Shingles
17. Carpal Tunnel Syndrome
18. Frozen shoulder
19. Tinnitus
20. Vertigo
21. Costochondritis
22. Hernia
23. Minor injury recovery, for example, common ankle sprains
24. Minor digestive issues, for example, mild Irritable Bowel Syndrome
25. Menopause symptoms, such as, fatigue, hot flashes, joint problems, headaches, and frozen shoulder
26. Common tension headaches
27. Mild, infrequent migraine headaches
28. Insomnia
29. Mild anxiety
30. Mild mood disturbances, for example, mild forms of Seasonal Affective Disorder
31. Poor impulse control, for examples, around food or emotions such as anger
32. Poor concentration, for example, in school age children
33. Sinusitis
34. Stress management
35. Healthy pregnancy
36. Post-operative orthopedic recovery, for example, meniscal knee repair
37. Hemorrhoids

Now, I am certain that I have left a few things off that our esteemed readership could chime in on! However, you get the drift that yoga can be very helpful for a wide variety of common problems that we, our family and friends, and our students (for the teachers out there) encounter each day.

For some of these conditions, the “why” is a bit harder to state exactly, as even in those conditions studied by scientific means, the underlying reasons why yoga is helpful is often merely hypothesis or theory yet to be proven. And that is not the purpose of this post. But for those interested in knowing more about the "why," Potential self-regulatory mechanisms of yoga for psychological healthis one example of researchers attempts to explain how yoga works for psychological issues. It’s pretty heady stuff, but you will get the clear sense that we still have a long way to go to understand “why” yoga works. However, we all have had the distinct personal experience that yoga really does help with these common minor conditions. I will update the list over time as I think of more common minor problems yoga helps with come to me, and will add your suggestions as well!

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