Yoga For Lower Back Pain

I came across a very interesting article that I wanted to share with you. It's from The Guardian and looks at how yoga has been proven to be more effective as a treatment for lower back pain than conventional methods.

Something yogis have known for thousands of years.

Doing yoga is a more effective way for people with lower back pain to become more mobile than the treatments currently offered by GPs, according to new research.

The study found that back pain sufferers recorded greater improvements in everyday physical tasks such as walking, bending down and getting dressed if they did weekly yoga sessions.

Participants who had practised yoga reported enhanced function compared with those receiving standard care, even nine months after the yoga classes had finished.

Back pain is estimated to affect 80% of adults at some point in their lives, and one in five people visits their GP in any given year because of it. The condition, defined as chronic if it lasts longer than six weeks, is the second most common cause of long-term disability after arthritis and second only to stress as a cause of absence from work.

"In the past when you had back pain, you were told to lie down until it passed," said Prof David Torgerson, director of the York Trial Unit at the University of York, who led the study. "These days the main advice is to keep your back active. It seems yoga has more beneficial effects than usual care including other forms of exercise."

Twenty experienced yoga teachers from the British Wheel of Yoga and Iyengar Yoga were trained to deliver a beginner level course of 12 yoga sessions specially designed to be safe and beneficial to those with lower back pain.

A group of 156 patients with chronic lower back pain were assigned to have the 75-minute yoga classes, in addition to normal GP care, while a control group of 157 just saw their GPs. Those who did the yoga scored on average 2.17 points lower on a function questionnaire than those who did not. Three and nine months later, their scores were still significantly lower.

Around 60% of those in the yoga group continued with their practice after the classes finished.

- The Guardian, via the Annals of Internal Medicine