The Science of Yoga

Marina del Rey, two seaside playgrounds. Payne taught regular yoga. But he also toiled to advance the kind of healing that he himself had experienced and to integrate it into Western medicine. If nothing else, that was an astute business move that helped distinguish his enterprise from the region’s growing number of yoga teachers.
    The credential he needed for high credibility in his new calling was a medical degree. But the course work was staggering. The next best thing was a doctorate. It, too, could open doors. But either a doctor of philosophy degree or doctor of physical therapy degree represented a huge investment in time andmoney for a young person, much less a man of forty who was trying to reinvent himself. A solution beckoned. It was convenient, located just across the Santa Monica Freeway in Brentwood, home to the rich and famous. Payne found a book on alternative colleges that gave it a thumbs-up.
    Pacific Western University had just one drawback. It was what federal investigators came to look upon as a diploma mill. The private school gave the appearance of being an institution of higher learning, but in reality provided little by way of education for its students. It accepted the transfer of academic credits and gave credit for life experience, but required no classroom study or instruction. What it did with enthusiasm was award master’s and doctoral degrees—all for a flat fee. A doctorate cost a bit more than two thousand dollars. That was nothing compared to what a student could pay at a real school, semester after semester.
    Pacific Western had no national accreditation, and that meant its degrees carried no weight with informed scholars and employers. In time, state, federal, and foreign governments came to regard the school as an educational fraud. Some states blacklisted its degrees as worthless or illegal.
    In 1987, when Payne got his doctorate, the school was fairly new and had yet to receive much scrutiny. On his résumé, he declared that he “earned a master’s degree and a doctorate in fitness education with an emphasis in Hatha Yoga from Pacific Western University.” The school might have had no foreign language requirement or classroom challenges, but its message was relentlessly upbeat: “Look within yourself,” the school told prospective students. “Exert yourself with dynamic will power through positive thinking and persistence and you will stretch your talents and imagination and achieve new heights of learning while attaining professional and personal success.”
    Payne did just that. He became a whirlwind. Armed with his new credentials, he gave lectures, wrote books, made instructional videos, appeared on radio and television shows, and, in 1989, helped found the International Association of Yoga Therapists. As its founding president, and later its director and chairman, he enjoyed a new world of global influence. The group began its journal in 1990, and Payne worked hard in his new job to drum up new readers and memberships.
    Bigger things beckoned, and in 1999 Payne entered the burgeoning field of popular yogabooks. Yoga for Dummies featured his Ph.D. prominently on the cover, along with that of his coauthor, Georg Feuerstein. As a team, Payne covered yoga’s modern aspects while Feuerstein, an Indologist, handled its ancient ones. The twin credentials lent the book an air of authority and set it apart from competitors, although its biographical materials gave no indication of where Payne received his doctorate or in what field. The book identified him as chairman of the International Association of Yoga Therapists and a yoga teacher with a thriving practice who “responds to his clients’ specific health challenges,” implying that he was a credentialed healer. At a minimum, many readers probably assumed that his doctorate—ostensibly a proof of high academic standing—meant that the book reflected the best understanding of modern science.
    The truth lay elsewhere.
    The chapter on yoga breathing distinguished itself for its repeated praise of supplemental oxygen as a secret of yoga’s powers. Deep inhalation, it declared, “loads your blood with oxygen.” Three pages later, Yoga for Dummies enlarged on the error. Pranayama, it said, “allows you to take in more oxygen food for the 50 trillion cells in your body.” That, of course, not only described a false oxygen rise but made the claim sound more authentic by linking it to the striking body-cell