The Science of Yoga

of ailment—including cancer and AIDS, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s. And clients are lining up, ready to pay for what appears to be an all-natural, innovative kind of healing.
    The surge is creating not only a lively commerce but, as the last chapter showed, a threat, since yoga in unskilled hands can bear the risk of serious injury. Patients can get hurt. In some cases, yoga therapists have managed to prescribe what turns out to be exactly the wrong move. As Fishman putit, “They treat in a very generic fashion that can be dangerous.”
    In 2008, Yoga Journal released a market study done by Harris Interactive. The survey of more than 5,000 people—a sample large enough to be considered statistically representative of the entire population of the United States—showed that yoga therapy had achieved wide acceptance among patients and, arguably more important, among the nation’s health-care providers. The survey extrapolated to conclude that a doctor or therapist had recommended yoga to nearly fourteen million Americans—or more than 6 percent of the population. And nearly half of all adults reported that they held the field in high esteem, saying they felt yoga would help them if they were undergoing treatment for a medical condition. Even if the poll targeted yoga enthusiasts and overstated the degree of national interest, the trends nonetheless seemed quite real.
    “Yoga as medicine represents the next great yoga wave,” Kaitlin Quistgaard, the editor of Yoga Journal , stated during the study’s unveiling. “In the next few years, we’ll be seeing a lot more yoga in healthcare settings and more yoga recommended by the medical community.”
    Perhaps so. But for the moment, yoga therapists are wholly unregulated and thus the quality of their care is random. Some are geniuses. Some are charlatans. And many are surely mediocre and potentially dangerous, their heads filled with dreamy nonsense about healing and empty of real knowledge about the serious dangers of some poses. Yoga therapy is now in the Wild West stage of development. Some practitioners are busy putting up shingles, selling snake oil, and making astonishing claims. Buyer beware.
    If the origins of the modern field can be traced to a single person, it would be Larry Payne, the founding president of the International Association of Yoga Therapists. Like Fishman, Payne came to yoga therapy early—decades before its current popularity. But his background is quite different from that of Fishman, and his long pursuit of professional credibility illustrates some of the difficulties that the field must overcome if its would-be healers are to become trusted members of the health-care community.
    A native Californian ofathletic build and interests, Payne began as an advertising executive in Los Angeles. It was a good life. Payne had lots of money and perks, including a generous expense account and a company car. By 1978, however, the rising pressures started to hurt. His blood pressure soared and his back went out.
    The pain drove him crazy. (I can sympathize. I once got hauled away in an ambulance, blind with agony.) He tried orthopedic specialists, physical therapists, and drugs. Nothing worked. He looked into surgery. He felt like an old man, though only in his midthirties.
    Desperate for relief, Payne let a friend drag him to a yoga class. He did the postures, the deep breathing, the relaxation. It was amazing. For the first time in two years, his back pain disappeared. He marveled at the unfamiliar feeling of happy relaxation. Overall, it was as if a huge weight had been lifted from his shoulders. In some ways, he felt reborn.
    Payne continued the lessons and left his advertising job. Soon he decided to devote himself to yoga.
    In India, he traveled to Madras (later known as Chennai) and studied at the Krishnamacharya Yoga Mandiram, a school of yoga therapy that had been recently founded by T. K. V. Desikachar, the son of Krishnamacharya, the guru to the gurus. The school, like its namesake, hailed yoga’s therapeutic benefits and focused on healing. Among its specialties: the relief of lower back pain. It also treated everything from headaches and high blood pressure to asthma and schizophrenia. By 1980, Payne was hooked. He proceeded to recast himself with all the energy and marketing savvy of an ad executive.
    In 1981, he founded a yoga center in Los Angeles that he named Samata, Sanskrit for “balance.” It was located near Venice and