special feature: can Yoga kill you?

CAN YOGA KILL YOU? - The Natural History of a Moral Panic by Matthew Head & Pete Yates

Even able journalists can be seduced by the keen pleasure of appearing to debunk sacred cows into being less than circumspect, accurate or fair. The announcement on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme of Tuesday  7/2/12 that ‘Yoga can kill you’ fell prey to this syndrome.  ‘Yoga can kill you!’: what a great sound-bite that was, too juicy to resist . The following short interview with William Broad, author of The Science of Yoga: The Risks and Rewards (2012), and Pierre Bibby, CEO of The British Wheel of Yoga was less sensational but it didn’t do much justice to the ‘risks and rewards’ of Yoga, which are in reality a matter of great intricacy and nuance.

The main points of the piece were as follows: after assuring us that Yoga is great and that he loves it having survived decades of practice, Broad asserted that ‘cranking the neck about’ can cause damage to the arteries that run next to the neck vertebrae, possibly causing blood clots which can migrate to the brain causing a stroke. A certain kind of trauma to the arteries (though rare) will allegedly kill one in twenty of those suffering it. The main dangers of such trauma found in Yoga practice are, according to Broad, headstand, shoulder-stand and plough postures. Nothing was said about any reliable research that might justify this claim apart from some generalised appeal to emergency room statistics and an insistence that there is such research.  At this point both Bibby and Broad concurred that Yoga as such isn’t ‘the problem’, rather that ‘green teachers’ are.  Bibby then took the opportunity to exonerate BWY teacher training from this general suspicion by appealing to its duration of 500 hours over several years. His parting gambit was to resurrect a venerable BWY mantra and urge  the public to ‘quiz your teacher’ as to his or her training, having first planted the notion of  BWY’s bona fide in the collective psyche in readiness for a possible torrent of customer anxiety.

The BBC were actually rather late in the day in visiting a debate which has rumbled on for years but which recently  exploded furiously across the New York and wider US Yoga scenes with the publication of an article adapted from Broad’s book  in the New York Times of January 5th 2012 entitled ‘How Yoga Can Wreck Your Body’. [CLICK HERE TO SEE ARTICLE]  Oddly, the web version of the article, which read at times like a set of hysterical warnings, was adorned with jokey photographs of people in inverted postures which did seriously look likely to cause at least a cricked neck and which would make even the greenest Yoga teacher wince with concern for the models posing for these pictures. (You’d think that with the ill repute that has befallen the press of late more care would be taken to avoid this kind of stupid contradiction.) The Guardian followed up on the 14th January with a report of this stateside furore, adding its own hardly evidence-based horror stories of Yoga injuries. [LINK TO ARTICLE]

So what kinds of responses to this situation have been forthcoming?

Leslie Kaminoff, author of Yoga Anatomy (2011) and well-known New York-based ‘Yoga educator’ covers most of the options in his fluent and cogent video response to the NYT article on Youtube [LINK TO VIDEO]. Firstly we find Kaminoff implicitly addressing the question of what Broad’s agenda(s) might be, if any beyond producing a good read.  Clearly Broad is stimulating debate on the subject of Yoga induced injuries, which Kaminoff and most of the commentators we have come across say they welcome. Furthermore, Kaminoff notes that the subject choice of the risks (rather than the far less news-worthy rewards) of Yoga practice for the article is a ‘brilliant’ piece of marketing ahead of the publication of Broad’s new book.  And it has worked: The Science of Yoga was number one on Amazon.com  in its category even prior to publication!

Kaminoff makes the further point that when Broad is writing about Yoga, he is actually means Yoga asana practice and that this is in fact but a fragment of the vastness which is Yoga per se.

Kaminoff goes on to consider the risks of asana practice compared with other activities and points out the obvious fact that there is an inherent risk associated with all activities in life, including staying in bed all day. He berates Broad for not placing Yoga asana practice on the spectrum of risk, thereby failing to help the reader to make rational decisions about taking up a Yoga practice or continuing one.  In this video, Leslie Kaminoff does admit that he hasn’t yet read the book but that he is responding to the NYT article alone.

At some point though, Kaminoff must have acquired a copy of the book because he has written a review of it on Amazon [LINK TO REVIEW], in which he exposes the impressionistic nature of Broad’s statistics and criticises the quality of the science, (strictly, pointing out its absence), upon which Broad’s claims regarding the extent and seriousness of asana-related injuries are based. He points out that the evidence Broad offers up is mostly anecdotal and where there are medically-evidenced cases, they are a few in number and at least thirty years old.  In this review he also considers Broad’s motives. Kaminoff asserts that Broad is seeking mainstream medical acceptance for Yoga as a therapy and that he has an agenda in wishing to ‘medicalize’ the educational standards of Yoga teachers, with the attendant strong ‘governmental regulation’ being instituted. Kaminoff remains implacably committed to ‘keeping our profession free from coercive forces of any kind’ as he has been to our knowledge at least since the 1990s. [Kaminoff has now added a cogent review of the book to Youtube. LINK TO VIDEO]

The reliability of Broad’s science is also questioned on Ed Stern’s  Astanga Yoga New York blog in a piece wittily entitled How the NYT can Wreck Yoga. [LINK TO BLOG] Stern quotes two experts quite extensively and they are both worth quoting here, if only to illustrate that what Broad asserted as fact on the Today programme is actually contested.  Marshall Hagins, PT, Professor, Department of Physical Therapy, Long Island University states that “A balanced, serious, and accurate scientific report on the risks of Yoga would have, at a minimum, explicitly stated that no one actually knows the injury rates for Yoga, as is actually the case.”  Then, Chiropractor Rick Bartz, D.C. addresses a case of vertebrobasilar artery (VBA) stroke explicitly mentioned by Broad.  Bartz squashes the notion that the 25 year old patient in question was in danger of brain damage due to “blockages of the left vertebral artery between the C2 and C3 vertebrae” because the three other neck arteries are perfectly capable of keeping the brain adequately supplied with blood. These arcane anatomical considerations serve to remind us that scientific sounding assertions are not immune from questioning nor should they be.

The question of the comparative safety or otherwise of Yoga has been further raised in a post by David Keil on the Yoganatomy blog [LINK TO BLOG],  again in response to the NYT article. In this post Keil helpfully provides a top-ten list of physical activities by number of injuries sustained in the USA in 2006, which he found ‘rather quickly’ on the web. The number of injuries is startling (over two million in the top five alone). Top of the list is basketball , which apparently caused over half a million injuries on its own. Needless to say, Yoga asana does not make it onto this list.  Keil makes the point that the article focuses exclusively on the horror stories and does not give voice to anyone who has actually benefited from Yoga asana practice. Keil also raises the issue that the article assumes the purpose of asana to be therapeutic. He asserts that although asana can have therapeutic results, the purpose of asana is as an aid to meditation.  

He considers the issue of having personal responsibility for our actions and, like Kaminoff, makes the point that a Yoga asana does not exist in the abstract as a ‘thing’, separate from the practitioner performing it, and so is not something we as practitioners can blame solely for any injuries we might sustain.  Performing a Yoga posture is not like taking a pill, an action in which any resulting praise or blame can be rationally attached to the pill alone. We are involved in a Yoga posture when we actualise it, with all our attitudes, tendencies, genetic predispositions, conditionings and so on.  To extend this thought a little, Broad’s call for regulation stops making sense when there is no-thing to regulate. However, towards the end of his article, Keil does give us a piece of safety advice. He tells us to find the most ‘qualified’ teacher in our area. Quite what he means by ‘qualified’ in this context might be interesting to find out.

In his article, Why Yoga Can’t Hurt You: if You Can Find It, which can be found on our articles page [CLICK HERE], Godfrey Devereux takes a very different and more radical approach.  He claims that Yoga cannot actually hurt us, so long as it is in fact Yoga! Devereux looks at how Yoga practice has gone from a marginal activity to an enormous multi-billion dollar business which has been subsumed into the consumerist culture of the modern age. He asks the very pertinent question of much modern Yoga asana practice, namely is it really Yoga at all? He raises the points that self-enquiry is at the heart of Yoga and that for Yoga to be Yoga at all it has to be concerned with the experience of practice itself rather than ‘ambition, tradition, geometry or assumption’.  The take on Yoga that assumes that it is therapy, self-improvement, well-being management or the like, and which sets the terms of the debate ignited by Broad,  is here simply cut through. According to Devereux, you need to ‘honour in action what the intelligence of your body is saying’ if you are going to undertake the enquiry that is Yoga through the medium of the body. And since in the normal course of things the body is strongly programmed not to will its own injury, the approach being recommended here is intrinsically safe.

From all of this it is possible to identify the following five responses to the assertion that the practice of Yoga is potentially unsafe and should therefore be tightly regulated:

Asserting that asana practice is not the whole of Yoga and claiming that it does leads to a truncated version of what Yoga is;

Asking  ‘What is the real agenda behind all of this?’ and ‘ What do those people taking this position actually want?’

Asserting that  claims like Broad’s relating to the safety of Yoga  are based on bad science;

Noting that the whole of life is dangerous anyway and Yoga asana practice is hardly more so (and often much less so) than many other activities;

Suggesting that we should re-visit the nature of Yoga practice itself because it has been misunderstood and that there is an approach to practice which is inherently safe and beneficial.

What then does this topography of the debate tell us? For ourselves, we believe it is pretty obvious that Broad’s science doesn’t bear examination: there are two many lacunae in it and too much contrary expert testimony.  That there are further political agendas in operation throughout this debate is also pretty plain to see.  We know only too well that regulation has its champions who stand to do very well out of spear-heading it and the phantom of serious injury makes a nice Trojan horse in this respect.  That all activity has attendant risk really does need to be taken into account and the culture of fear that seems to be overtaking us needs to be kicked into touch by some perspective and realism. Further, as yogis, we should be insisting on the freedom of individuals to take risks, (in other words,  to live), and recommending the wisdom of facing the peril of the world with full, unflinching recognition and equanimity, as indeed Yoga itself recommends. At the same time, we think that honesty on the part of Yoga teachers about what they are offering and its supporting rationale is necessary to help autonomous adults to make informed choices about Yoga practices they are considering.

This debate inevitably widens out into one about the nature of Yoga itself, not least because the conflation of Yoga with asana practice, which historically, textually and in practice is a mere fragment, is a misunderstanding which the scaremongering and calls for regulation are both consolidating and feeding off. This would not matter very much except for the fact that the gifts of Yoga in its unfragmented breadth and depth are incalculably priceless, and Broad’s word ‘rewards’ with all its connotations of consumerist acquisitiveness does them no justice. This potent Yoga is vast and simply will not be pinned down. Its gifts can only be discovered by individual practitioners who are willing to encounter honestly what they actually find in the field of their experience.

That very able commentator on Yoga, Patanjali, offers us many intimations as to how we might meet the gifts of Yoga. Particularly potent is the practice of ahimsa with respect to our selves. This asks us to abandon not only the punitive striving  to conform to some received idea of what we should be able to do physically, (which is otherwise bound to end in physical injury), but all guilt, all self-condemnation and hostility towards our lives as they are (which is otherwise bound to end in psychological injury).  The resulting ease is miles away from the anxiety and panic that the New York Times seems hell-bent on creating in its hostility to life.

 

Matthew Head (editor) and Pete Yates February 2012

William Broad’s newly published book, The Science of Yoga: The Risks and Rewards has stimulated extensive debate in the Yoga world. Broad’s skilful promotion of his ideas in the New York Times and on the BBC’s Today radio programme has spawned myriad comments across the blogosphere and in many mainstream newspapers.

A lot could hang on the way this debate progresses for the practice of Yoga and the lives of Yoga teachers and the sensationalism with which the press has taken up the story has been less than helpful in bringing clarity to bear on the important issues raised. Hence this special feature ahead of our usual start of the month deadline.

It has three parts.

Below, Matthew Head and Pete Yates offer a critical survey of the debate to date as a means to identifying the core issues. They then offer their own interpretation of events and the more general situation they are underpinned by. The article contains quite a few links to readily available source material for those interested in researching more deeply.

On the reviews page, Chris Holt offers a review of Broad’s book. If anyone else wants to add a review, please get in touch.

Godfrey Devereux has written a lucid article in direct response to the contention that Yoga can hurt you which radically questions the  nature of Yoga practice itself: NOT TO BE MISSED! CLICK HERE TO READ.

No doubt this debate will run and run. Please send any comments, articles, or reviews to the editor.