Yoga for depression? Unimpressive science from impressive institutions

The title of the press-release was impressive: ‘Columbia and Harvard Researchers Find Yoga and Controlled Breathing Reduce Depressive Symptoms’. It certainly awoke my interest and I looked up the original article. Sadly, it also awoke the interest of many journalists, and the study was reported widely – and, as we shall see, mostly wrongly.

According to its authors, the aims of this study were “to assess the effects of an intervention of Iyengar yoga and coherent breathing at five breaths per minute on depressive symptoms and to determine optimal intervention yoga dosing for future studies in individuals with major depressive disorder (MDD)”[…]

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Yoga improves quality of life, fatigue and sleep of breast cancer patients

Today is WORLD CANCER DAY.

Yesterday I prepared you for this event by alerting you to a disgusting cancer scam, and today I want to contrast this with more encouraging news from the strange world of alternative medicine. So I searched Medline for a fitting, recent publication showing at least some value of an alternative therapy. Believe me, such papers are few and far between.

But here is one:

The aim of this Cochrane review was to assess effects of yoga on health-related quality of life...

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Mind over body? Or poor science over truth? | Edzard Ernst

Mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) has not been rigorously evaluated as a treatment of chronic low back pain. According to its authors, this RCT was aimed at evaluating “the effectiveness for chronic low back pain of MBSR vs cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) or usual care.”

The investigators randomly assigned patients to receive MBSR (n = 116), CBT (n = 113), or […]
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Adverse effects of yoga | Edzard Ernst

Yoga is a popular form of alternative medicine. Evidence for its effectiveness is scarce and generally far from convincing. But at least it is safe! At least this is what yoga enthusiasts would claim. Unfortunately, this is not entirely true; adverse events have also been reported with some regularity. Their frequency is, however, not known.

A new study was aimed at filling this […]

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Ivengar Yoga for back pain – as good or bad as most other treatments ? | Edzard Ernst

Iyengar Yoga, named after and developed by B. K. S. Iyengar, is a form of Hatha Yoga that has an emphasis on detail, precision and alignment in the performance of posture (asana) and breath control (pranayama). The development of strength, mobility and stability is gained through the asanas.

B.K.S. Iyengar has systematised over 200 classical yoga poses and 14 different types of Pranayama (with variations of many of them) ranging from the basic to advanced. This helps ensure that students progress gradually by moving from simple poses to more complex ones and develop their mind, body and spirit step by step […]

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What are the adverse effects of yoga? | Edzard Ernst

My sister-in-law is a long time yoga practitioner. She was recently diagnosed with severe glaucoma. She had the notion that headstands would help her glaucoma (probably with the idea of bringing more blood flow to the eyes), but I found several PubMed abstracts about inverted poses being hazardous for glaucoma sufferers as they dramatically increase intro-ocular pressure...

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