Gentle yoga can ease back pain, say the results of a study published recently in the Annals of Internal Medicine. Researchers divided 101 people with chronic, moderate back pain into three treatment groups: yoga, conventional exercise, and those who taught themselves back exercises from a self-care book.

Over at least 12 weeks, the yoga group experienced less pain more quickly than the other groups. And those people––many weeks after the study––are still using less pain medication than their study peers. Researchers working through Group Health Cooperative, a non-profit consumer-run insurance and health care organization in Seattle, Washington, applied the gentle rigors of viniyoga to the study. The teacher they chose, Gary Kraftsow, author of Yoga for Wellness, is a pioneer in the slow-moving practice, which is often used therapeutically for injuries. In these classes most of the relatively simple poses were not just held, but were repeated three to six times. Short pranayama sequences bracketed each session and each class ended with a deep relaxation exercise.

Dr. Karen J. Sherman, the study’s lead author, told Reuter’s Health today that similar results could not be expected from more vigorous styles of yoga, which, she said, could make things worse. Though it’s not exactly a newsflash for those who have experienced the body-altering benefits of yoga (of 14 million American practitioners 1 million do yoga specifically for back pain), it is a nice, big, legitimizing step forward for alternative therapies. Researchers could not explain exactly why the viniyogis got better faster, but Sherman speculated to Reuters “that yoga's ‘mind and body effects’ are at work.”

Photo by Leonard Metcalf