117 Health Conditions Helped by Yoga (as Shown in Scientific Studies)

Welcome to the 2019 update of "Health Conditions Helped by Yoga (as Shown in Scientific Studies): A Bibliography of Research." This all started out in 2007 with the publication of my book Yoga as Medicine: The Yogic Prescription for Health and Healing. In the "Science of Yoga" chapter, I included a list of 43 conditions that medical studies suggested yoga benefitted.

In the 12 years since Yoga as Medicine appeared, the amount of scientific research of the ancient Indian practice has exploded, growing at an ever-increasing rate. According to my colleague Dr. Sat Bir Singh Khalsa of Harvard Medical School arguably the leading authority on yoga research in the United States the quality of that research has also improved.

There are now numerous randomized, controlled trials (RCTs), considered the "gold standard," in the scientific investigation of medical treatments, as well as dozens of metanalyses, studies that combine the results of RCTs. This growth in yoga research allowed Dr. Khalsa and I along with Dr. Lorenzo Cohen of the MD Anderson Cancer Center, and India's Dr. Shirley Telles, the most prolific yoga researcher in the world to co-edit the 2016 medical textbook The Principles and Practice of Yoga in Health Care.

Due to the expanding research base, when I updated Health Conditions Helped by Yoga in 2010, the list had grown to 54 conditions. When I added research through 2012, I was amazed to see it had jumped to 75 conditions. By late 2016, it was 101 conditions. Now it's 117.

The irony is that in yoga therapy, we don't treat medical conditions per se. We treat individuals. We help them de-stress, stand and sit with better posture, breath more efficiently, calm their nervous systems and boost their immune function. We give them practices that help them sleep better, feel happier, find greater peace of mind and a heightened sense of meaning and fulfillment in their lives. By doing these things (and much more), yoga can help almost any health condition, mental or physical, to improve. More precisely, the people with these conditions can feel better and function better whether from a medical standpoint they can be cured or not. This is what holistic health which considers every aspect of mind, body, spirit and environment is all about.

A further irony is that the research showing so many benefits of yoga, almost certainly underestimates the discipline's healing powers. There are many reasons for this but a big one is that in order to fit into the rules of medical research, yoga studies assign standardized yoga routines based on the person's western medical diagnosis. This is the antithesis of what good yoga therapists actually do. The best yoga isn't "one-size-fits-all" based on the health condition (or one of them in those people have more than one). State-of-the-art yoga therapy is tailored to individuals and their unique, and ever-changing, situations. If truly personalized yoga is ever studied scientifically, I believe it will almost certainly be shown to be more effective (and likely safer) than the standardized protocols currently favored in research. My latest book, Saving My Neck: A Doctor's East/West Journey through Cancer, explores this issue in detail.

Whatever its limitations, yoga research has been enormously helpful in making the case that yoga heals. It has helped win over many doctors, skeptical journalists and tens of millions of members of the general public. For this we owe yoga researchers an enormous debt of gratitude.

This bibliography includes dozens of pages of references, as well as hyperlinks to study abstracts and, where available, free full-text articles. This document is also available as a PDF with hyperlinks to the abstracts/full text articles at Dr.McCall.com. I publish these lists as a service, so please feel free to share this PDF on your web page, post it on social media, a

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