A Yoga Offer to Health Care Professionals

by Baxter

Before I can let you in on my offer to health care professionals, I need to give you a little background information on how the offer came to be. As many of you know, I spent the first part of my professional life as a family MD, working in a busy primary care office, dispensing prescriptions for all sorts of diseases and acute illnesses, and sending patients off to see the physical therapist or the MD specialists when the situation warranted it.  Nowhere in my training was there any mention of “alternative” or “complementary” therapies that I might offer to my patients. (That situation is slowly changing in this country, thank goodness!) 

When I first started doing yoga in 1994, it was a completely personal thing; it felt really good for my overworked body and my stressed-out mind. I felt more grounded, clear and rested after my practices and that was enough incentive for me to continue to practice. I finally decided my interest was growing beyond the personal and I wanted to learn more so I could teach yoga, too. One of the first workshops I offered was to the medical staff at the hospital my patients would go to if seriously ill. It had a staff over 200 admitting doctors. My theme was the health benefits of yoga, and my hope was to expose my colleagues to those benefits, who by and large had never done yoga and had a very confused idea of what it was. I recall that several of the family docs in my practice attended the evening session, along with several nurses and perhaps one or two other staff docs. It was by no means the turnout I had hoped for, but it was a start.

Clouds Reflected in Jade Green Lily Pond by Nina Zolotow

Since that time, I have been delighted to have several doctors, nurses, nurse practitioners, physical therapists and other health care providers attend classes regularly. And they often express how beneficial the practice is for them, and simultaneously express their frustration with the demands of the works schedule that often makes it hard for them to attend as often as they would like.  Such is the reality of these hardworking people.

So, even though I have had some health care workers in class over the years, I have always had this underlying impression that the vast majority of docs and others in my community have never taken a class, let alone investigated the variety of styles of yoga that they or their patients might explore to assist in improving their health. This is despite decent articles in magazines like Yoga Journal and Yoga International that provide overviews of yoga styles and what a student can expect to encounter in regards to physical demands and such.  

This is why I was delighted to be invited to a yoga blogger’s Round Table on July 23, 2012, sponsored by the National Institute of Health’s NCCAM division, the Complementary and Alternative Medicine branch that sponsors studies on the potential benefits of practices like yoga, meditation and Tai Chi, to mention just a few. And for those unfamiliar with this part of our federal government, they have funded and completed perhaps a dozen studies in the past 12 years or so, looking at the benefit of yoga on a variety of conditions.

The purpose of the Round Table was to engage a group of bloggers who are writing about yoga and health in a dialogue about what they are doing there and to get any input from us out here in the real world.  Super exciting! Leading up the event, we were given access to view a new seventeen-minute video they are releasing tomorrow on some new studies on yoga and health, which also provides some guidelines on yoga’s benefits and situations where caution should be given to patients. I watched it immediately and was delighted in the balanced information they are providing, so do check it out this week when you get a chance (see http://nccam.nih.gov/video/yoga-trailer).  

Later that day, the webinar began with about seven bloggers from around the US online and on a conference call to hear more about what the NCCAM folks are up to and to get our feedback. At one point in the presentation they shared what they called “tips for consumers,” which were all pretty reasonable. As always, they suggested that you discuss your interest in starting yoga for your health with you health care provider. This seems often a kind of perfunctory recommendation that we hear a lot. But it brought up my ongoing concern that there is a disconnect between this recommendation and what your doc may actually know about yoga, so I raised my cyber-hand and suggested that patients might also want to ask their doctor or nurse practitioner what their personal experience has been with yoga before deciding if any advice given by the doc about yoga is sound advice.

I obviously see a gap that exists between what my fellow yoga professionals and I know about the benefits of yoga, and what the medical establishment knows about yoga. I often gripe about this, and nothing changes. As it turns out, a few days later I am away at a yoga festival, and doing a Zen Meditation workshop on the first day, and things get quiet inside (me, of course!). And as often happens a first step suggestion arises in the quiet: get more health care professionals to my yoga classes!  After a bit more reflection, I came up with a plan.  I will now do what I can to make this a reality in my classes with the following offer: for all you health care professionals out there, your first class with me is free. (See bellyoga.info for a schedule of my local classes and my workshops around the country.)

Now, I know that most of our readers are already doing yoga. But you all know health care workers who have never done yoga, could really use it, and would potentially share their new discovery of yoga with their patients.  So I am hoping you will spread the word, on Facebook, Twitter and any other means at your disposal to get the word out. And if you teach, consider making a similar offer to your communities and students as well. I’d love to see 2012 go down as the year that saw a huge exposure of yoga to the medical world in a more real and tangible way, and I am hoping you can help! I know it might be a small step, but sometimes a small step can get things moving in the right direction. And don’t forget to check out the NCCAM web site http://nccam.nih.gov/, as they have a lot of good info for the public regarding the research they have completed. I’ll let you know about two studies featured in their video in the next week or so.