The Science of Yoga

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 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