The Science of Yoga

simply immersed himself in it and proceeded to send it toward a large audience. He was credulous rather than duplicitous. That is not to say his missteps were inevitable. Iyengar and some other famous yogis managed to avoid the fog. But Payne failed to do so and became one of its prominent casualties.
    Fishman knows all about hazards that lie beyond the strictures of modern medicine. He says he works with Payne, the association, and yoga therapists out of a desire to help them become more scientific.
    “Yoga is in danger,” he told me in his Manhattan office. “It can tip either way—toward science or religion, toward people who are seeking to know the truth or toward people who like hierarchies.” Most yoga therapists get their information from a guru, he remarked. “That’s what they believe and trust.”
    But science now has the means to determine what really works in yoga therapy and why, Fishman argued. Its methods can reduce false diagnoses and risky treatments. Its respect for the facts, he added, can help turn the fledgling discipline into a real profession.

V
HEALING
    L oren Fishman kept getting seduced. He studied mathematics, logic, and philosophy at the University of Michigan and Oxford and, on the side, dabbled in yoga and meditation. But he kept getting attracted to new subjects, kept wanting to learn something that would help him minister to what he considered an ailing world. In England, he stumbled upon Iyengar’s book and became entranced. The yoga was so clean, so anatomically sophisticated, so advanced compared to anything else he had encountered. The book became his bible. At the same time, Fishman kept up his wanderlust, going to India to learn Sanskrit and ancient grammar so he could look for clues to the origins of mathematics.
    One day in 1973, a friend mentioned that Iyengar lived nearby. Ah, Fishman thought—the master. The young man from Chicago was already a long way from home. But he wanted to go farther.
    Fishman knocked on Iyengar’s door and was surprised when the yogi himself answered.
    “What do you want?” Iyengar growled.
    “I want to learn your yoga.”
    “Why?”
    “Because I want to heal.”
    “That’s my great thing! Come in.”
    Fishman told the yogi of his dreams and then checked into a nearby hotel. It had a lush rooftop garden and everything an itinerant scholar could possibly want. As a teacher, Iyengar was tough and prickly. He would tease Fishman, saying the eager student had deluded himself into thinking he understood the Iyengar system.
    Finally, after a year of instruction, Iyengar ordered Fishman to go home and start teaching. Fishman did so. But he also decided to get as serious as he could about healing and went off to medical school—Rush Presbyterian St. Luke’s in Chicago, one of the oldest and most respected medical schools in America. It was founded in 1837, two years after the inauguration of the Bengal Medical College, a half a world away.
    Today a growing number of physicians study yoga after medical school. Fishman was one of the first to do so beforehand. His medical immersion when he was already an advanced student of the discipline let him see yoga through a Western lens, understanding its routines in terms of the fine distinctions of anatomy and physiology, chemistry and physics. In some respects, he was able to fuse the West’s storehouse of scientific knowledge with the inspiration of Iyengar’s visceral creativity. It was a fresh approach that bristled with possibility and seemed to offer a new way to minister to the world.
    Fishman graduated in 1979 and did a psychiatric internship at the Tufts Harvard Medical Center in Boston, eager to help troubled minds. But he found it unsatisfying and instead threw himself into rehabilitative medicine.
    The field seeks to help individuals with broken bones, torn muscles, dead nerves, injured tissues, and other physical disabilities. Its rehabilitations draw on a wide variety of tools and treatments. Standard ones include slings, braces, crutches, drugs, prostheses, walkers, physical training, therapeutic exercise, and many adjustments to the lives of patients.
    In Fishman’s case, the options include yoga.
    Few locations in the world of medical real estate are classier than 1009 Park Avenue in New York City, between Eighty-Fourth and Eighty-Fifth. It has a large but discreet awning and the usual glint of polished brass. The old building is as elegant as any on the Upper East Side. The