The Science of Yoga

could prove distracting, embarrassing, and possibly litigious. The candor tended to come from the community’s lower ranks.
    A leading forum was Yoga Journal. It ran a number of articles, including one in 2003 in which a teacher revealed her own struggles. Carol Krucoff—a yoga instructor, author, and therapist at Duke University in North Carolina—told of being filmed one day for national television. Under bright lights, urged to do more, she lifted one foot, grabbed her big toe, and stretched her leg into Utthita Padangusthasana, the Extended Hand to BigToe pose. As her leg straightened, she felt a sickening pop in her hamstring.
    The next day, she could barely walk. Krucoff found that she needed rest, physical therapy, and a year of recuperation before she could fully extend her leg again. “I am grateful to have recovered completely,” she wrote in Yoga Journal , adding that she considered the experience “a small price to pay for the invaluable lessons learned.” These included the importance of warming up and never showing off.

    Extended hand to Big toe, Utthita Padangusthasana
    One glossy feature in Yoga Journal devoted ten pages of colorful photos and prickly text to the risks. “Yogi beware: Hidden dangers can lurk within even the most familiar pose,” read the headline. Judith Lasater, a physical therapist and president of the California Yoga Teachers Association, argued that most poses hold subtle menace. The inherent risks can become quite palpable, she wrote, “because you may not have the necessary knowledge, flexibility, strength, and subtle awareness to proceed safely.”
    On another occasion, Kaitlin Quistgaard, the editor of Yoga Journal , told of how she had reinjured a torn rotator cuff in a yoga class, her pain becoming a cruel presence for months. “I’ve experienced how yoga can heal,” she wrote. “But I’ve also experienced how yoga can hurt—and I’ve heard the same from plenty of other yogis.”
    And, no doubt, from plenty of lawyers. In fine print, the magazine began to run a legal proviso: “The creators, producers, participants, and distributors of Yoga Journal disclaim any liability for loss or injury in connection with the exercises shown or the instruction and advice expressed herein.”
    To its credit, themagazine paid attention to strokes, although it did so somewhat defensively and superficially. “Proceed with Caution,” read the headline of its one-page article. The large color photo showed students upended in Headstands. The neck of a woman in the foreground was backlit and stood out. The article said doctors had identified five risky poses: the Headstand, the Shoulder Stand, the Side Angle pose (which Krishnamacharya had hailed as a cure), the Triangle (which Iyengar had carefully aligned), and the Plow, or Halasana. It had students lie on their backs, lift their legs up over their heads and back down onto the floor, inverting the torso. The article said such poses were judged potentially dangerous because they “put extreme pressure on the neck” or resulted in “sudden neck movements.”

    Plow, Halasana
    It said nothing of two other poses that physicians had identified as serious threats to the brain: the Cobra and the Wheel, both considered X-rated postures.
    The article warned thatyoga practitioners could mistake injuries of the vertebral arteries for simple migraines or muscle tension. The symptoms of deeper trouble, it said, included piercing neck pain, pounding one-sided headaches, and facial paralysis. “Warning signs,” it cautioned, “can intensify for hours or even days before a stroke hits.”
    So far, so good. But the magazine then proceeded to downplay the threat by failing to put the issue in perspective. It said doctors had found injuries to the vertebral arteries from all causes (such as yoga, beauty salons, and chiropractors) to be rare—annually, a person and a half out of every hundred thousand.
    This was accurate. But it ignored the big picture. If twenty million people in the United States did yoga—a standard figure—and if yogis suffered the injury at the same rate as the general population (a very cautious assumption, given all the neck twisting and bending), that meant three hundred yogis in the United States faced the threat of stroke each year, or three thousand over a decade. The magazine not only neglected that baseline figure but sought to put its readers at ease by stating that yoga was “the culprit in a minuscule