The Science of Yoga

his head hard enough to produce a bruise.
    The wave—whatever its true dimensions—represented a clear rebuke to the “mother’s milk” argument. Facts can be stubborn things, and they now suggested that yoga had long involved not only celebrated benefits but a number of hidden dangers.
    For most of the twentieth century, yoga in the West enjoyed news coverage that can be described conservatively as excellent. The discipline was portrayed as nearly miraculous in terms of promoting health. An analysis of American reporting in the Columbia Journalism Review found much of it fawning.For gurus and publishers, the favorable coverage was, as the Columbia analysis put it, “the stuff of dreams.”
    The year 2002 marked a radical shift in the tenor of the reporting as the surge in documented injuries stirred public discussion on the issue of yoga safety. The seeming oxymoron of yoga damage had reached a critical mass in terms of size and social resonance that now made the issue impossible to ignore.
    Stories appeared on radio and television as well as in magazines and newspapers, including The New York Times and The Washington Post. The rising public debate and the accompanying journalism meant that the injured were no longer portrayed exclusively as the anonymous stick figures of medical reports and federal surveys but began to take on the colorations of real life.
    Holly Millea, for instance, was a freelance writer living in New York City who prided herself on staying in shape. The petite runner of forty-one practically never got sick. Body & Soul magazine recounted what happened when, in 2001, she took up Ashtanga yoga. By August of 2002, Millea began to feel numbness and tingling down her left arm and into her first three fingers. The pain grew and hampered her ability to sleep on her left side. The magazine said that, at one point, she thought the problem might be her heart or even multiple sclerosis—which ran in her family. Finally, after one emergency room visit and two rounds of medical imaging, Millea got the diagnosis: One of her vertebral disks had begun to bulge, squeezing a critical nerve. The magazine reported that her doctor wanted to surgically remove the disk and fuse two vertebrae together if the numbness failed to go away on its own.
    “I am sure this is yoga-related,” Millea said in the article, which appeared in 2003 amid her trouble. “It’s at the base of my neck, and I was doing Shoulder Stand a lot. I was doing it wrong, and I was pushing myself too hard.” She blamed herself and her competitive edge rather than yoga and its physical demands. “I am a super-athlete, and thought I could do anything,” she added. “But I took it too quickly. I still needed to take baby steps.”
    A number of stories came down hard on Choudhury and his hot yoga. An article in The New York Times said health professionals found that the penetrating heat could raise the risk of overstretching, muscle damage, and torn cartilage. One specialist noted that ligaments—the tough bands of fiber that connectbones or cartilage at a joint—failed to regain their shape once stretched and that loose joints could promote injury. Another said the mirrored walls of Bikram studios encouraged students to neglect the traditional inner focus of yoga for outer distractions and the pressures of a room full of competitive individuals, also courting injury.
    Not long thereafter, Choudhury came out with his book Bikram Yoga. It said nothing about dislocations or nerve damage, despite the medical warnings and bad press. It also managed to ignore the accusations of his critics. The few references that Choudhury made to the topic of physical damage centered on how hot yoga worked quite beautifully to promote a safe experience. The heat, he declared, lets students “twist and stretch with less chance of injury.”
    The period around 2002 also marked a turning point in that some elements of the yoga community started to move beyond denial and evasion to address the issue of damage. To a degree, the bad publicity left few alternatives. Now, for the first time, a number of experienced yogis and yoga publications engaged in serious debate on how to handle the quiet epidemic and come up with safety guidelines. It marked a period of public introspection—with notable exceptions.
    The famous gurus, for the most part, remained silent. Publicly, at least, it seemed like their objective was to avoid involvement in any particulars that