The Science of Yoga

quite reasonable and forward-looking. But the association has long engaged in activities that have helped blur the issue of what constitutes a genuine credential.
    Every time members pay their annual dues to the association, they receive a fancy certificate suitable for framing that looks very much like a school diploma. It is personalized, too. I’ve gotten a number of them—one when I joined and others when I have renewed my membership (which now costs ninety dollars). The first one hangson the door of my home office.
    It looks quite elegant. The certificate is printed on parchment-colored paper and bears a gold border in a fine geometric pattern. The whole idea of a certificate—which the dictionary defines as “a document proving that the named individual has fulfilled the requirements of a particular field and may engage in its practice”—is evocative of professional accomplishment. The certificate’s reference to an “award,” and its twin signatures at the bottom, reinforce that idea. But a quick read shows that the document is in fact quite meaningless. In my case, it says I received the certificate “in recognition of supporting Yoga as an established and respected therapy in the West.”
    The certificate is signed at the bottom by Kepner, the group’s director, and Veronica Zador, its president. I’ve seen similar ones displayed prominently in yoga studios—framed and lending an air of authority to the teaching and healing enterprise.
    The phony credential does an injustice to the talented yoga therapists who have labored for years and decades to develop their healing expertise and have helped countless people. From what I saw, Nina Patella in Fishman’s office ministered to a patient needing special attention with great skill and compassion. So did Amy Weintraub, the yogini who specializes in treating depression. The organizational ups and downs of the field reveal its troubled development but say little about the genuine therapeutic abilities of particular individuals.
    Even so, the continuing lack of regulation and the hundreds of false claims that aspiring healers make about their credentials are helping fuel the field’s rapid growth. The International Association of Yoga Therapists has seen its membership rolls increase from hundreds to thousands of members. Dozens of books hail yoga therapy as a sound treatment for most every kind 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