The Science of Yoga

Sunday morning at Davos is usually reserved for relaxation and sports. Many participants ski the nearby slopes. But not that Sunday—not with its driving snow, high winds, and zero visibility. Payne found his session packed.
    He had arrived.
    Around this time, Payne met a medical doctor with whom he formed a close relationship. The doctor, Richard Usatine, had practiced at the Venice Family Clinic and gone on to help run the program in family medicine at the University of California at Los Angeles School of Medicine—one of the world’s top medical schools, located just a few miles from Payne’s yoga center. The two met after Usatine walked away from a car accident but suffered serious back pain. He tried the usual treatments but got no relief. Soon he was referred to Payne and began a yoga routine that quickly ended his anguish.
    The men bonded over backs, healing, and a deep belief in the body’s hidden powers of recuperation. The two began discussing how to give medical students a sense of yoga’s benefits and soon founded an elective course. A medical-school first in the United States, the UCLA class gave an overview of yoga and yoga therapy. The popular course became a regular part of the school’s elective curriculum.
    Encouraged, Payne and Usatine joined forces to author Yoga Rx , published in 2002. Ittaught how yoga could treat everything from heartburn to asthma to back pain. In bold type, its cover featured not only Usatine’s M.D. but Payne’s Ph.D. The former ad executive was moving not only ahead but up.
    Significantly, Yoga Rx was more closely aligned to the science than Yoga for Dummies. The book, as it proclaimed from the start, reflected Usatine’s medical expertise “on every page.” In particular, it made none of Payne’s false claims about pumping up the metabolism and burning more calories as a method of weight control, even though it devoted a long section to fighting obesity. The account was plain but honest.
    As Payne moved ahead on his blur of projects, he managed to stay more closely aligned with the science. His encounter with a knowledgeable coauthor seemed to produce something of a midcourse correction.
    His new moderation showed in a spinoff. In 2005, he released Larry Payne’s Yoga Rx Therapy: Weight Management for People with Curves , a video disc. The program had little depth. And it made the customary omission of saying nothing about how yoga tended to lower the metabolic rate and, all else being equal, threatened to saddle the student with added pounds. But Payne, looking sincere, speaking with ease and confidence, made no wild claims and statements at odds with the known science. Instead, he voiced simple truths and encouragement.
    “Real weight management is about making sensible lifestyle changes, including exercise,” Payne said. He added that regular yoga built self-discipline. “You wouldn’t think that doing yoga would keep you from opening the refrigerator door. But it does.” He smiled.
    Unlikely as it seems, the professional lives of Fishman and Payne have intersected and drawn close over the years. It is, one might argue, a kind of healing.
    Fishman joined the Advisory Council of the International Association of Yoga Therapists, where he works with Payne in an effort to improve the profession’s standards as well as its methods of practice and teaching. They go to conferences together, chat, and socialize.
    Fishman told me he liked Payne. “He’s good, knowledgeable, and serious—and a nice guy on top of it,” Fishman said.
    So, too, Payne kept up his science trajectory. In 2005, he helped found and became the director of the first program in the United States for the certification of yoga therapistsat a university—Loyola Marymount, in Los Angeles, a Catholic school that overlooks the Pacific. The program has turned out dozens of therapists—mostly women—and sits on the Council of Schools that the association established as a way to promote standardized training.
    Payne told me that his recent emphasis on science grew out of the community’s rising interest over the years as well as his own. As for his Ph.D., he defended the degree as a substantive credential that he used in good faith and said he was unaware of anything improper about the school. “I honestly knew nothing about any shady stuff.”
    It seems clear that, early on, Payne was as much a victim of pseudoscience as a perpetrator. He did not create the blur of misinformation but