The Science of Yoga

nerve damage and strokes. Waves of practitioners were showing up in emergency rooms. The Consumer Product Safety Commission, in monitoring the hazards of modern life, runs a little-known detective service known as the National Electronic Injury Surveillance System. It samples hospital records in the United States and its territories. By 2002, its surveys showed that the number of admissions related to yoga, after years of slow increases, had begun to soar. The number of admissions went from thirteen in 2000 to twenty in 2001. Then, in 2002, they more than doubled to forty-six. By definition, all these episodes involved men and women (and in some cases children) who had hurt themselves badly enough to seek out emergency assistance.
    The spike represented the tip of a very large iceberg, since the system of federal monitoring produced only a statistical sketch. Most emergency rooms lay beyond its reach. Moreover, only a fraction of the injured visited hospital emergency rooms in the first place. Many—perhaps most—went to family doctors, chiropractors, neighborhood clinics, drugstores, and various kindsof therapists. Some probably decided to avoid treatment altogether and deal with the injury on their own. Thus, many hundreds or even thousands of yoga injuries in the United States went unreported.
    The 2002 survey, like that of any year, gave a brief description of each person and each injury. An analysis of the information on the forty-six patients showed that they ranged in age from fifteen to seventy-five years, with the average age being thirty-six. The vast majority—83 percent—were women. The main type of injury centered on the complicated amalgams of bone, tendon, and cartilage known as joints, including the wrist (mentioned six times), the ankle and foot (five times), the knee (five times), the shoulder (four times), and the neck (four times). The injury write-ups contained an area for brief comments, which tended to describe everyday pains, strains, and sprains. But the comments also disclosed a number of serious traumas. Six of the injuries involved dislocations and fractures.
    The survey listed no strokes—their diagnosis would typically require detailed examinations that went beyond the simple capabilities of most emergency rooms—but in several cases listed symptoms that might have coincided with the precipitating damage. “Acute neck pain,” read one write-up. “Collapsed to floor while performing yoga,” read another.
    The brief comments tended toward the kind of pithy diagnoses and observations heard in emergency rooms: “dislocated right knee,” “hurt shoulder,” “low back pains.” The reports usually cited yoga in general as the cause of the accident but on occasion named specific poses. “Sharp pain in abdomen since doing Cobra,” read one report. Another said a male patient fainted while doing yoga in a warm room, falling and hitting 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