Medical professionals are opening up to yoga as treatment for depression and anxiety.
Because of the wide range of benefits to yoga, different groups of people have taken an interest in the mind-body regimen. Athletes may use it for conditioning. Celebrities use it for body sculpting. However, a growing number of medical professionals are using it as a complementary treatment for depression and anxiety, as well as for a number of other conditions.
Brant Rogers and Paul Salmon are two yoga practitioners who were invited to discuss the holistic exercise at the Spring 2012 Annual Scientific Conference on mindfulness. They've reviewed studies on yoga in the context of back pain, cancer and other illnesses.
"The very broad effects documented in these studies show that this practice affects our life as a whole," the practitioners wrote in The Forest Grove News-Times. "Those effects extend beyond fixing what is wrong to enhancing what is right in our inherent and global capacity for healing through heart, mind and body."
However, the practitioners emphasize that the importance of yoga doesn't lie in complex poses and rituals, but in the creation of a safe, attentive and relevant experience for an anxious or depressed individual, the news source said.
According to the Yoga Journal, 14 million Americans practiced these exercises on the recommendation of a medical professional in 2008. Patients looking for Oregon yoga classes shouldn't have much trouble finding one!
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Tags: depression and anxiety, Oregon yoga, Oregon yoga classes, treatment for depression and anxiety
