Modern Science Confirms Yoga’s Many Health Benefits

Modern Science Confirms Yoga’s Many Health Benefits
Joe Raedle/Getty Images
Sayer Ji
Updated:

Modern science now confirms why humans have been practicing yoga since the beginning of recorded history: it is good both for the body and mind. 

There is evidence in the archeological record that yoga has been practiced by humans for at least 5,000 years. Whereas this would constitute sufficient evidence for most folks to consider it a practice with real health benefits, as its millions of practitioners widely claim.

Yoga, of course, is no longer exclusively practiced by a particular religious group.  It is considered a form of low-impact exercise and stress-reduction, and is estimated to be practiced by 20 million people in the US alone.  This interest among Westerners happens to be why so much human clinical research has now been performed on yoga. The US National Library of Medicine’s bibliographic database shows that in 1968, seven studies were published on yoga. This year, there have been over 250. So much research, in fact, has accumulated that even systematic reviews of the literature have now been published.

Take a recently published systematic review in the Clinical Journal of Pain where an evaluation of ten randomized controlled trials found patients with chronic low back pain found “short-term effectiveness and moderate evidence for long-term effectiveness of yoga for chronic low back pain.”

Sayer Ji
Sayer Ji
Author
Sayer Ji is the author of the best-selling book, “Regenerate,” and is founder and director of GreenMedInfo.com, the world’s largest open-access natural health database. As a natural health rights advocate, Mr. Ji cofounded Stand For Health Freedom, a nonprofit organization dedicated to protecting basic human, constitutional, and parental rights, and recently launched Unite.live, a worldwide platform for conscious content creators.
Related Topics