What Does The Science Say About Yoga For Pain?

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Did you know that back pain is one of the most common reasons people go to the doctor? Even more surprising is that most Americans have had symptoms of low back pain at least once in the last three months—causing employees to miss work, lowering the productivity of companies, and costing our healthcare system a lot of money.

Previous research has suggested that yoga is helpful for low-back pain, but the quality of the research wasn't particularly strong and there were questions about whether or not the improvements would hold true for racial and ethnic minorities and across diverse socioeconomic backgrounds. To gain some more clarity, this study followed a group of 320 racially diverse and mostly low-income adults for a full year.

The data showed that yoga and physical therapy produced similar results and these results were better then the newsletter and self-care education group. At 12 weeks the yoga and physical therapy groups were using less pain medication than the newsletter group and all the improvements were maintained at 52 weeks, which marked the end of the study period. Benefits were also correlated to the number of sessions attended by the participants. In other worlds: if you suffer from low-back pain, your yoga mat is a good place to start healing—assuming you can afford it and you enjoy it enough to stick to them program.