Yoga’s not the cure-all so stop pushing it on me
‘‘Have you tried yoga?’’ is a common piece of advice you get if you’re going through an illness or a tough patch.
People suggest it and medical professionals suggest it. It’s not that it’s a bad suggestion – yoga is helpful for many people, me included – but the refrain is getting grating.
Yoga is not a panacea. Some pretty off-the-wall health claims have been made about yoga.
Bikram Choudhury – who popularised an intense form of yoga where the room is heated to 40 degrees Celsius – claimed that his set of yoga postures cured Richard Nixon of phlebitis and relaunched the sporting careers of Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and John McEnroe.
Most contemporary teachers are less outlandish with health claims. In a summary of peerreview studies of the health benefits of yoga, it was concluded that yoga classes are comparably as good for your health as other forms of exercise, with the added benefit that it helps people gain better body awareness, improves lower back pain, and may help reduce inflammation in the body.
There’s plenty more we don’t know about the impact of yoga – like whether it can improve anxiety and mood, whether some forms are more effective than others, or whether it should be prescribed as treatment for various conditions.
When I was 21, a doctor suggested my joint aches were a result of poor posture and that yoga would help. It absolutely did help my posture, but the aches continued.
Later, a different doctor suggested these aches were tension compounding in my body as a result of anxiety. So, I took a yoga class that was advertised to help anxiety. It did also help, but I was still achy.
I’d taken batteries of tests ordered by a range of doctors, but the null results caused them to shrug their shoulders. More yoga?
Eventually, at 28, my aches were diagnosed as Ehlers Danlos syndrome, a connective tissue disorder that affects the production of collagen.
It turns out I wasn’t achy because of poor posture or anxiety, I was (and am) achy because my joints are so lax they partially dislocate, and my muscles work overtime trying to keep my skeleton together.
When a doctor asks, ‘‘have you tried yoga?’’ it feels like code for, ‘‘I’m out of ideas, I don’t want to deal with you any more, I think your pain isn’t serious’’.
Yoga is wonderful but it’s not enough to bridge the shortfalls of our medical system – a lack of awareness of conditions, and a tendency to dismiss symptoms. It couldn’t tell me what was happening with my joints, or how to reduce my symptoms.
When your friends and family ask if you’ve tried yoga it’s equally as disheartening. I’ve got to the stage where I can honestly say yes, I’ve tried yoga, and pretty much everything that doesn’t require me to go into a shop that has crystal skulls in the display window and offers palm readings.
But what I’ve tried isn’t the point. When people ask that, they might feel that they’re being helpful but, really, they’re closing the conversation. They’ve stopped listening to us describe our experience, they’ve stopped empathising.
They’ve started looking for ways that they can subtly blame us for our problems, for not trying hard enough, and go back to talking about the weather. They probably even know, deep down, that yoga is not the cure.
– The Age
When a doctor asks, ‘‘have you tried yoga?’’ it feels like code for, ‘‘I’m out of ideas’’.