Читать книгу Yoga Therapy as a Whole-Person Approach to Health онлайн

65 страница из 110

The limitation of modern medicine in managing stress-induced psychosomatic, chronic illnesses is the strength of yoga therapy. Hence a holistic integration of both systems enables the best quality of care for clients. It is imperative that advances in medicine include the holistic approach of yoga to face the current challenges in healthcare. The antiquity of yoga must be united with the innovations of modern medicine to improve quality of life throughout the world. This approach is becoming more acceptable with time, and a great proponent of such a method is Dr Dean Ornish, who has just published, with his wife Anne, UnDo It! How Simple Lifestyle Changes Can Reverse Most Chronic Diseases.25 They describe in detail lifestyle medicine that they have been practicing and researching for the last 40 years, which is based on such an integrated approach, and has successfully reversed cardiovascular disorders and other NCDs.

Lately, Dr Bhavanani has actually begun to question the very scientific research itself that makes up the foundation of “evidence-based” yoga therapy. Many excellent scientists are researching yoga and its effects on different populations and in different conditions, yet their understanding of yoga is too limited to produce meaningful results. This is because they try to fit the grand design of yoga into the limited box of scientific methodology, and end up not studying “yoga” at all. The research that is published is excellent from a scientific perspective, but truly very limited from a yogic perspective. We need to continue working on keeping the yoga in yoga therapy, and especially in yoga research, where it tends to get lost in the tight limitations of “standardization” and “study protocols.” Yoga therapy, by its definition, cannot be standardized or limited, as it is carefully crafted to the need of each client.