Make Bending, Twisting, Arching - A Daily Ritual

This CAM Abates A Host Of Psychosomatic Conditions
Look around, and you see entire multitudes of people indulging themselves every now and then in their favorite pastime of lolling in the acid-tub of anxiety and reclining on the thorn-bed of stress. Nothing wrong with such pastimes; some amount of anxiety and stress is prescribed by the doctor too - good for health, they say. The only problem is when we turn them into a passion. There are passions and then there are passions. The difference between being passionate about golfing & jogging and being passionate about anxiety & stress is that while the former can make the body and the mind healthy, the latter can lead the body and the mind towards disorders.


Statistics on world mental health numb the mind. A face-to-face household survey of about 85,000 adults across 17 countries (published in the September 2007 issue of the Lancet) reveals that up to 30% of the population worldwide is affected by mental illness every year. Yet another survey conducted on 155,000 subjects across 16 European countries (published in this 2005 paper) is another eye-opener: that "almost every second person in the EU is or has been affected by mental disorders at some point in lifetime." And what are the top-ranking disorders? Anxiety, mood (major depression and bipolar), somatoform (persistent pain, hypochondriasis and somatization), substance-dependence and psychotic.


With such prevalence, one would expect mental health treatment facilities to have their hands full. Turns out, that does not appear to be the case. The Lancet article mentions for example that - leave aside resource-deficient countries - even in resource-rich countries such as the USA, "roughly half of those with severe disorders receive no services." The EU paper says that only 26% of all cases in the EU have ever had any consultation whatsoever. I double-checked the dates of publication of these papers, wondering whether I had stumbled across reports of the Dark, Medieval Ages by mistake. When all we had by way of mental health treatment services were shamans and witch-doctors and animal and human sacrifices on new-moon and full-moon nights and other, ah, "auspicious moments". But, no, these reports allude to data collected and analyzed in the later part of the present decade, Twenty-first Century. One can't escape the feeling that there is a serious flaw in the way the world functions. That despite the flaw the world continues to function must itself be a miracle. And that there is a better quality of living awaiting the entire civilization if only we learn to better manage the precious resource of the six billion skull boxes (brains) and the corresponding six billion soul boxes (bodies).

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* 'Copper carving (XVIIIth century) showing a sami shaman with his magic drum (meavrresgarri)' - wiki.
The major problems with pharmacological and psychological treatment have been identified to be costs, clinician-availability and medication-intolerance. People either cannot afford treatment, or there is a serious paucity of clinicians, or their body rejects the medications the doctors have so carefully concocted. It is in this background that self-administrable, easy-to-use CAM techniques become attractive.


So which CAM are we talking about here? Yoga. Medical literature is replete with case studies where double-blind randomized controlled trials (RCT) with placebo conditions have been undertaken, and which have been replicated, and whose outcomes point to yoga being comparable to medication in terms of intervention effectiveness. A combination of yoga and medication has been found to be superior to just medication, any day. In anxiety disorders, yoga for a subgroup of patients has been found to be the perfect solution, better than medication. In the case of mild to moderate major depression and dysthymia, yoga is effective as second-line monotherapy. In general, practicing yogic exercises on a daily basis alleviates mood and anxiety symptoms associated with medical illness.


For instance, in one study a group of alcohol-dependent individuals underwent Sudarshan Kriya Yoga (SKY) therapy daily for one hour, one hour after breakfast, for two weeks. (SKY is a variant of yoga and involves rhythmic hyperventilation at different rates of breathing. Here is the SKY study.) The researchers discovered that the SKY group recorded a significant drop in plasma cortisol as well as ACTH levels. Both these are biological markers, with a higher level associated with stress and coexisting depression. All that the alcohol-dependent depressives had to do to achieve this miracle was to spend an hour everyday performing this particular therapy, and after that go about their daily routine.

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* Photo courtesy PictureYouth.com
A group of Vietnam War veterans, diagnosed with PTSD co-occurring with major depressive disorder (MDD), was subjected to Iyengar Yoga therapy. (This form of therapy makes use of props such as cushions, sandbags, etc in order to maintain the body in a specific posture for a period of time. Here is the Iyengar Yoga paper.) At the end of the program, the veterans reported getting better sleep, better anger management, less medication and better quality of life.

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* An Iyengar Yoga posture, wiki.
It is not only plasma cortisol and ACTH levels that change with continuous yoga practice. Plasma prolactin, whose production in the body slows down in depression episodes, and whose shortage has been associated with recurrence of depression even after successful treatment, bubbles up again after yoga therapy. Waves emitted by the brain, which hit abnormal frequencies due to intense depressive thinking, begin to calm down... I can go on, singing paeans of this CAM. The only adverse effect of yoga is shortness of breath and fatigue in first-timers who tend to take on anything new with abundant and overflowing enthusiasm. Easy does it.

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* Photo courtesy PictureYouth.com.
Yoga is essentially an eight-component system which defines a certain lifestyle to be adopted in order to live healthily. Google on the word and you will come across over 100 million pages ranked on this one subject. A survey of current trends of yoga in the US shows that nearly 16 million Americans have embraced yoga as a health therapy, and the crowd at yoga camps is swelling every day. (Here is one instance of an individual in the US taking up this Oriental lifestyle as a profession.) It is a sign of the times that Doctors are recommending patients to take up yoga to augment their treatment. If you haven't already, join the club!