Spine Savers

Back bothering you? Join the club. Better yet, try these poses.

By Melanie Haiken

Physician Loren Fishman still recalls clearly the day 30 years ago when he found his calling. Not yet a doctor, he knew that he wanted somehow to help people in pain. He was contemplating going to medical school but had chosen first to spend a year studying yoga with B.K.S. Iyengar in Pune, India. "One day," Fishman says, "Mr. Iyengar suddenly asked me, 'You want to go teach my yoga?' It caught me off guard, but I thought, 'If he says I can teach it, I guess I can teach it!'"

Today Fishman is a noted specialist in back pain with a rehabilitation clinic in New York City. But he still teaches at least one yoga class a week for his patients. And he recommends yoga to many patients with back pain, through both his practice and his books, the latest of which is Relief Is in the Stretch: End Back Pain Through Yoga.

Most importantly, after many years of feeling isolated from his fellow doctors by his focus on yoga, Fishman now finds himself sought out by them. "Using yoga to treat back pain is increasingly respected by mainstream experts," Fishman says. "I hear from more and more of my colleagues that they are adding yoga to the therapies they recommend."

For a long time, doctors were reluctant to endorse yoga because they felt there wasn't solid science showing it worked. Some studies have been done over the years, but most were carried out in India or Europe and didn't turn up in major American medical journals. That changed last December with the publication in the respected Annals of Internal Medicine of a randomized, controlled clinical trial—the most definitive form of scientific evidence—that showed quite clearly that yoga helps those with low back pain: Not only did yoga work, but it worked so well that it surpassed even traditional physical therapy exercises.

Researcher Karen Sherman and her colleagues at the Group Health Cooperative in Seattle took 101 adults suffering from chronic low back pain and randomly assigned them into three groups. One group attended weekly yoga classes for 12 weeks, following a therapeutic routine developed specifically for lower back pain by Viniyoga experts Gary Kraftsow and Robin Rothenberg. The participants were also expected to practice the poses at home every day.

The second group attended a program of stretching and strengthening exercises developed by a physical therapist, also once a week with daily home practice. The third group received a self-care book that included some stretches and relaxation exercises.

It turned out that the yoga participants had less pain and were better able to go about their daily activities than people in either of the comparison groups. Follow-up revealed that after three months, the yoga practitioners continued to have less pain and better function, and they needed fewer pain medications.

This certainly echoes my own experience. Chronic back pain that was keeping me from working more than a few hours a day sent me to my first yoga class, aching for relief. And I discovered that certain poses—Marjaryasana (Cat Pose) at the beginning of the day, Supta Baddha Konasana (Reclining Bound Angle Pose) at the end—make a huge difference.

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