[HPI note: This is a rebuttal for an article summarized on HPI on January 7, 2012, linked here .]
WASHINGTON, DC, USA, January 7, 2012 (By Sheetal Shah): I’d like to thank the The New York Times for continuing to fuel the relevancy of the Hindu American Foundation’s Take Back Yoga campaign. The latest piece in the Times Magazine, “How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body” by William Broad, just adds more fodder to the campaign. Broad’s latest has naturally upset many in the yoga community – it’s a rather silly, one-sided piece that highlights a handful of people who have suffered injuries due to their yoga practice.
The male college student sitting on his heels in vajrasana “for hours a day, chanting for world peace” is hardly the typical profile of an everyday yoga practitioner. It’s also rather curious that Broad had to go back as far as 1973 to find a healthy, 28-year-old woman who suffered a stroke due to backbending. Admittedly, Broad agrees these are seemingly rare, but goes on to note that yoga-related injuries have been increasingly since 2000. Isn’t that obvious? As with any activity that requires physical exertion, it is only logical that as it becomes more popular, the number practitioners will increase, as will the number of injuries.
Broad draws his conclusions from studies that were individual case reports which, according to the physicians at HAF, carry the stamp of least academic legitimacy and are effectively, tantamount to anecdotes. And while several systematic, randomized studies have demonstrated the health benefits of yoga, no large, matched cohort or epidemiological study has ever revealed the dangers, making me yet again wonder why his piece received so much space in the magazine.
Putting aside the absurdity of Broad’s very narrow base of examples, there are two larger issues which his piece touches upon. The first is essentially the premise of the Take Back Yoga campaign: Yoga is not a purely physical exercise, and to view it as such is the crux of the problem. But asana alone is not yoga, and as yoga teacher Glenn Black comments in the piece, “Asana is not a cure-all.”
The second problem, which Broad explicitly covers in his interview with Black, is the surge of yoga teachers who are not qualified to teach and are thus, prone to pushing their students too far, leading to injuries. To compound the issue, in an effort to not exclude anyone (or perhaps make as much money as possible, depending upon the studio), its appears that the majority of yoga classes are “open to all levels” leaving the decision of which asanas to attempt and how far to push the body up to the students.