What a Single Yoga Pose a Day Could Do

A single yoga pose each day may improve spine curvature for scoliosis patients

A new study claims performing a single yoga pose for 90 seconds for at least 3 days a week could reduce spine curvature in patients with scoliosis in as little as 3 months.

Patients with scoliosis who did the side plank yoga pose for 90 seconds a day saw significant improvement in spine curvature.

The researchers, including Dr. Loren Fishman of the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in New York, NY, publish their findings in the journal Global Advances in Health and Medicine.

Scoliosis - a condition in which the spine curves to the side - affects around 6 million people in the US and is accountable for more than 600,000 doctor visits each year. Although scoliosis can affect all age groups, onset is most common between the ages of 10-15.

Severe scoliosis - defined as a spine curvature of more than 45 degrees - is usually treated with surgery. There are non-surgery techniques available for patients with spine curvatures less than 45 degrees - one of the most common being bracing.

Each year, around 30,000 children and adolescents with scoliosis are fitted with a brace that is worn for around 23 hours a day, helping to straighten the childen's spines as they grow.

The researchers note that a popular bracing method - most commonly used in adolescent girls - requires patients to attend 40 2-hour sessions, three times a week for 3-4 months. The patients are then urged to carry out lifelong exercises for 30 minutes a day.

"Since many scoliosis patients are adolescent girls, the unwieldy bracing and lengthy exercising is socially awkward, emotionally painful and physically difficult," says Dr. Fishman. "And yet untreated scoliosis can progress at 7% per year, and result in disability and life-threatening health risks."

Patients required to perform the side plank on weaker side of spine

In their study, Dr. Fishman and colleagues set out to determine the effectiveness of one basic yogapose - known as the side plank - on 25 participants aged 14-85 with idiopathic scoliosis.

The side plank involves lying on one side of the body with straight knees, and propping up the upper body with the elbow and forearm.

After undergoing an initial examination, an X-ray and an evaluation by a radiologist, patients were shown how to carry out the yoga pose.

In the first week, they were instructed to do the pose on the side their spine was curved toward for 10-20 seconds each day. They were then asked to do the pose once daily for as long as possible, still on the side of their spine curvature.

Explaining the reasons behind asking the patients to do the pose on the side of their curvature, Dr. Fishman says:

"Since scoliosis is an asymmetrical condition, I have treated it asymmetrically, asking patients to do the pose on the weaker side only. That strengthens the specific spinal muscles on the convex side that are needed to help with curve reduction."

He adds that the National Scoliosis Foundation recommend that individuals with scoliosis perform 25 yoga poses to help with their spine curvature. However, he points out that no clinical results support the effectiveness of this, and patients are not advised to perform these poses asymmetrically.

Patients' spine curvatures were measured at the beginning and end of the study using the standard Cobb angle technique, and X-rays were taken again once the study ceased.

Yoga pose improved spine curvature by around 32% among all patients

On average, participants did the side plank pose for 1.5 minutes a day, 6.1 days a week for 6.8 months.

The researchers found that spine curvature improved by around 32% over all patients. Among 19 patients who did the yoga pose for at least 3 days a week, spine curvature improved by 40.9%. Of these patients, adolescents saw a 49.6% improvement in curvature, while adults saw a 38.4% improvement.

Commenting on the findings, the researchers say:

"Asymmetrically strengthening the convex side of the primary curve with daily practice of the side plank pose held for as long as possible for an average of 6.8 months significantly reduced the angle of primary scoliotic curves. These results warrant further testing."

Numerous studies have hailed the benefits of yoga for other health problems. Earlier this year, Medical News Today reported on a study that suggested yoga could reduce the risk of anxiety and depression in expectant mothers, while a 2013 study claimed yoga could help lower blood pressure.

This article originally appeared on medicalnewstoday.com and was written by Honor Whiteman

Yoga Therapy: Why Doctors Are Prescribing The Ancient Practice

In 2011, Jacquelyn Jackson had the most traumatizing year of her life. On a beautiful morning in Tucson, she was just 25 feet away when her former boss, Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, and 18 others were shot in a grocery store parking lot. In the weeks that followed, as Jackson began suffering symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder (including chronic anxiety and difficulty sleeping), she turned to a psychotherapist. The sessions helped “tremendously,” she says but 11 months later, when her seemingly healthy younger brother died suddenly from a brain tumor. “the trauma was so great I felt like I needed something more.”

Desperate, Jackson looked online for support and stumbled upon yoga therapy, an emerging treatment for people struggling with anxiety, grief, and trauma. Long practiced in India, yoga therapy was introduced in the United States some three decades ago but has begun gaining popularity only in the past five years or so. (Membership in the International Association of Yoga Therapists [IAYT] has quadrupled since 2004, to about 3,200, and next year the IAYT plans to begin accrediting yoga schools to offer a standardized certification program.)

“It’s not just postures,” says yoga therapist Janice Gates. “We use all the tools of yoga — breath work, sound, visualization, and meditation — and tailor them to a client’s specific health condition.” One of Gates’s clients was a woman in her 40s who was experiencing serious depression and anxiety but couldn’t tolerate psychiatric medication. While a doctor oversaw the medical issues, Gates worked with the client weekly to manage her moods. On days when she was anxious, Gates led her through exercises like standing poses and forward bends (to help her feel more grounded) and exhalation breath work (to calm her down). When the woman was depressed, she did back bends and inhalation exercises, designed to give her energy. Six months later, the woman’s crippling dark moods, once a thrice-weekly occurrence, now overtake her only a few times each month. With her newfound energy — and time — she’s teaching art classes to children.

Though research on the efficacy of yoga therapy is ongoing, traditional doctors are taking notice — and finding it, in some cases, to be a valuable complement to the work they’re already doing. “Yoga therapy can be extremely helpful for people who need a way to work through what they’re experiencing, not just in their minds but in their bodies,” says psychotherapist Jack Obedzinski, MD, of Corte Madera, California. “Often, it allows my patients to experience a feeling of calm in a way they couldn’t in talk therapy.” And, he says, this calmness can bring more clarity and awareness to their traditional sessions.

For Jackson, one-on-one yoga appointments with Amy Weintraub, a pioneer in the field and author of Yoga for Depression, proved transformative. In their first session, Jackson “was practically hyperventilating with anxiety,” says Weintraub, who created a program that included “stair-step” breathing, building up to deeper and deeper breaths. “What the yoga did was provide a slow, gradual path to help her manage her moods and not immediately react when grief arose.” After just a few sessions, Jackson no longer used medication to help her sleep at night. “Working with Amy was like doing emotional Roto-Rooter-ing,” she says. “I had so much stress in my body, and she was able to help dislodge it — and clear it out.”

This article originally appeared on huffingtonpost.com and was written By Laura Hilgers.

Check out our UPCOMING MENTAL WELLNESS WORKSHOPS with Shari Arial: Yoga for Anxiety, Stress & Trauma.

What Flotation Therapy Can Do For Depression

Study Demonstrates What Flotation Therapy Can Do For Depression, Stress, Anxiety & More

A study published in the journal BMC Complementary and Alternative Medicine explores sensory deprivation in a flotation tank as a form of preventative healthcare. Its results showed substantial reductions in levels of stress, anxiety, depression, and pain, and along with improved sleep quality and overall mood, proving that flotation therapy is an excellent way to prevent and treat many  emotional and physical ailments.

Sensory deprivation cuts off all the senses from the mind, removing it from the average barrage of stressful situations that most of us face each day. In the absence of distracting external stimuli, the mind enters a state of deep relaxation and meditation. The research shows how this state can actually be medicinal, as it has tremendous potential to reduce stress and thus the damaging symptoms that come with it.

Chronic stress expresses itself through things like depression, insomnia, and anxiety. Flotation therapy can directly relieve this, but how?

The relaxation response method (RR) is essentially the exact opposite of the fight-or-flight response. It is the physiological process that relieves stress, occurring during states of deep relaxation. RR is able to combat stress so efficiently because of its calming effects on the parasympathetic nervous system, the portion of the nervous system responsible for many physiological changes within the body including energy conservation and deep relaxation. It is through this process that RR lowers heart rate and blood pressure and slows down breathing.

The authors of the study noted that to successfully ignite the RR response while the body is under stress it is crucial to reduce all sensory input and movement by the body — which makes floatation therapy the perfect solution. The research described the mechanisms of this method: “During flotation-REST (Restricted Environmental Stimulation Technique) an individual lay in a horizontal floating posture immersed in highly concentrated salt water (magnesium sulphate) in a flotation tank. All incoming stimuli are reduced to a minimum during this period (usually 45 minutes), i.e. sound and light, and the water is heated to skin temperature. ”

The Study

Sixty-five participants — 14 men and 51 women — took part in the study. The participants were divided into a flotation-REST group, which consisted of 37 people, and a wait-list control group, with 28 people. The flotation group received 12 45-minute sessions over the course of seven weeks. Subjects were assessed for depression, anxiety, stress, sleep quality, energy, pain, and optimism before and after the study. These same measurements were assessed for the control group.

The flotation group displayed radically improved scores in comparison to the control group, with participants exhibiting reduced anxiety, depression, pain, and stress.

Here’s Some Data

The average score for stress before flotation treatment was 1.86; afterwards, it dropped to a remarkable 0.95. The control group scored 1.84 before and 1.89 after treatment, meaning their stress actually increased during this period.

The score for anxiety for the flotation group was 7.92 before treatment and 4.28 afterwards. On the other hand, the control group scored 7.03 before and 6.96 afterwards.

For depression, the flotation group started out with a score of 4.42, which then dropped to 2.25 after treatment. The control group started at 4.00 and ended the period at 4.30, another increase.

Researchers also saw an improvement in various lifestyle factors. Sleep quality, pain, optimism, and mindfulness were all measured and shown to increase with treatment. These results further strengthen the case for flotation therapy.

In the conclusion of the study the researchers were confident that flotation therapy can be an excellent practice to improve overall health by greatly reducing stress (and thereby stress related illnesses) while increasing psychological factors in healthy participants as well.

Final Thoughts

Isn’t it just amazing what a little bit of rest and relaxation can do for our mental and physical well-being? While it’s easy to say we should all just make the time to relax more, the issue here is that many of us won’t. If you actually make the effort to go to a float spa, which are becoming increasingly popular across North America, then you will be dedicating this time to yourself and will experience the ultimate form of relaxation. In fact, flotation therapy is one of the most potent methods of activating the relaxation response, and shows how our environment can directly impact our physiological and psychological well-being. Instead of taking prescription drugs for such ailments, consider giving this a try!

This article originally appeared on collective-evolution.com and was written by Alanna Ketler

The 3 Kinds Of Grief Nobody Talks About

The author of Grief Is a Journey explains how some of our most cutting losses can go unrecognized by friends and family—and even ourselves.

1) The Loss of a Person We Once Knew

Sometimes the people you love change in significant ways. They are still in your life—but not in the way you remember or once knew them. Illness often changes people, especially mental illness or dementia. In dementia, a person still is with us, but is not like the person we previously knew. The ties that bind us to one another, the shared memories and even the personality are no longer accessible. Sometimes the changes can be startling. The mother of one of my clients grew up in the segregated South. Yet her daughter was proud that her mom had been active in the civil rights movement, even though her mom lost friends and alienated family. Her mother would proudly tell the story of how, as an adolescent girl, she shamed her all-white church into integrating services. Yet, as her mom lapsed into dementia, she began using racial epithets. Her mother’s language not only shocked her daughter but also called into question her mom’s true beliefs. Was her mother really the progressive person she believed her to be?

Other illnesses can create a similar sense of loss. A traumatic brain injury generally affects all levels of mental function. We may grieve people as they sink into mental illness, alcoholism or drug use. Positive changes can also engender grief, when a person becomes different from the individual we knew and loved. For Tristan, it was the religious conversion of his brother. He was initially delighted that his brother found some faith, even if it was more intense than his own beliefs. But Tristan soon found it difficult to relate to his born-again brother who no longer wanted to share a beer and was always witnessing to Tristan and his family.

Similarly, Abigail was proud that her husband joined Alcoholics Anonymous after a long struggle with addiction that nearly ruined their marriage. Yet she misses the “people, places and things”—especially the pub-based dart club that was a shared activity—that her husband now avoids in order to remain sober. They celebrate New Year’s Eve at an alcohol-free party sponsored by his local AA chapter in a church basement. Abby is proud of her husband and supportive of his efforts at sobriety, even as she grieves aspects of her former life.

2) The Loss of a Person We Haven’t Yet Lost

Anticipatory grief is a term that refers to the grief felt about someone with a life-limiting illness; friends, family and caregivers often experience it in anticipation of an eventual death. These losses are significant. The loss of health—even the prediction of loss—contained in a diagnosis can be a source of grief not just for the person diagnosed, but also for his or her loved ones. We lose our assumptive world. All our plans, thoughts, our sense of the future— even our sense of safety and security—are now challenged. The future we know is not the one we once imagined. For Craig, his wife’s diagnosis of pancreatic cancer dashed their retirement dreams of travel and possibly relocating to Tuscany. As any illness progresses, we continue to experience additional losses and grieve each one.

Stay informed with the latest news and video. Download HuffPost’s news app on iOS or Android.

3) The Loss of the Person We Used to Be

Waiting for the school bus with my grandchildren recently, on the second day of school, I heard a young neighbor complain to his mother that he went to kindergartenyesterday! His mom patiently explained that he would now go five days a week to kindergarten—instead of his two-day-a-week preschool. The boy looked at her with disappointment, tears in his eyes. This changes everything!he complained.

It does. Everything changes as you age. Some changes you take in stride, but others affect you deeply. Consider the birth of a child. You may have anticipated this event for years and be overjoyed. But you also know life will be different now; over the next couple of decades, your own freedom will be limited—and for a shorter period, so will your sleep.

Each transition in our lives—no matter how positive—has an undercurrent. The thrill of passing your driving test and earning your license held so much meaning, a mark both of accomplishment and maturity that promised new freedom and adventure. Now, imagine the pain and grief when, through age or disability, you are forced to surrender that license and all it has meant.

Remember: Grief is not always about death, but it is always about attachment and separation. Often, people endure pervasive and intense distress without having faced the death of a loved one at all. Further, in these cases of unrecognized losses, our grief is often not recognized by others, either. But you can grieve the loss of anything, anywhere or anyone to whom you had become attached—no list could name all the possibilities. To deal with the sorrow, you may need to find confidants, counselors and support groups that can assist you. Above all, you need to have your grief acknowledged. Allowing yourself to understand the validity of your emotions is the only way to begin feeling better. You are not the only one to have mourned in these situations—and you are not alone.
 

This adapted excerpt was taken from Grief Is a Journey, byKenneth J. Doka, PhD. Dr. Doka is a professor of gerontology at the Graduate School of The College of New Rochelle and a senior consultant to the Hospice Foundation of America.

This article originally appeared on Huffington Post and written by By Kenneth J. Doka, PhD