The Science of Yoga

because of any deficiency on his part but because the United States has no regulatory body for yoga therapy. None. Zip. Nada. Few countries do. The field is, on the whole, completely unlicensed and unregulated.
    Even so, the yoga community has managed to foster the illusion that the United States has a system in place for the accreditation of yoga therapists. That New Age fiction is helping to promote the field’s growth. Unfortunately, it is also deceiving people, some desperate for healing because of serious illnesses and injuries.
    Yoga teachers who aspire to the role of contemporary healer often put after their names the initials RYT—short for Registered Yoga Therapist. They do it on books, brochures, and Internet sites. The practice may seem innocuously similar to how physicians use MD and dentists DDS. But the situation is entirely different.
    Since the RYT terminology is unfamiliar to many people, yogis, yoginis, and yoga groups often spell it out. For instance, Yoga Journal regularly uses the phrase “registered yoga therapist” to describe its experts and authors. So, too, a Google search produces many hundreds of hits for the phrase, identifying local healers from coast to coast.
    In 2006, the Montgomery County Department of Recreation, in the Washington, DC, suburbs, advertised classes featuring a registered yoga therapist “sensitive to individual needs.” Authors and booksellers love the accolade. Publicity materials for Yoga and the Wisdom of Menopause , by Suza Francina, a popular yoga writer, call her “a registered yoga therapist with 30 years’ experience.”
    And why not? The phrase sounds authoritative. The dictionary defines “therapist” as “a person trained in methods of treatment other than the use of drugs or surgery” and defines “registered” as “qualified formally or officially.” A Registered Yoga Therapist would, presumably, have undergone extensive training and passed the rigorous examinations of a national body of health-care specialists.
    Wrong. In fact, thereis no such thing as a Registered Yoga Therapist. It is an illusion—perhaps in some cases a lie. The world of professional recognition does have a category that centers on the practice of registration, though it is considered the lowest step in the expert hierarchy—far less meaningful than, for instance, licensing by a state medical board. National groups that register professionals typically record only various types of personal information, such as name, address, and form of practice. So, too, applicants for registration usually face no requirements to establish their education credentials, to pass national exams, or to show other evidence of expert proficiency. Registration, in short, bears no comparison to the rigorous world of health-care certification.
    Yoga therapists have adopted the evocative terminology through guile or sloppiness, or perhaps an unconscious mix of the two that plays to their economic self-interest. For whatever reason, many simply assert the status. In doing so, they can arguably draw cover from long discussions in the yoga community about the possibility of creating a regulatory category known as the Registered Yoga Therapist, as well as confusion over the meaning of similar credentials.
    Yoga Alliance uses the acronym RYT as shorthand for Registered Yoga Teacher. Its listed teachers can legitimately use RYT after their name. But individual yogis and yoginis, in their advertisements and self-promotions, often morph the term teacher into therapist —a change the field’s leaders actively discourage.
    “A growing number of yoga instructors seem to be assuming the role of ‘yoga therapist’ without having had the necessary training and experience,” Georg Feuerstein, editor of the International Journal of Yoga Therapy , conceded in a 2002 editorial. The term, he added, gets used liberally and often interchangeably with “yoga teacher.” As a solution, yoga leaders around 2003 began discussing whether the alliance should expand its registry to include yoga therapists. Nearly a decade later, no such registry had materialized.
    The International Association of Yoga Therapists, based in Prescott, Arizona, for several years has led public discussions of the possibility of creating standards as well as its own registry for yoga therapists. It has done so in the pages of the International Journal of Yoga Therapy , its publication. For instance, in 2004, John Kepner, the